This paper attempts to systematically characterize critical reactions in argumentative discourse, such as objections, critical questions, rebuttals, refutations, counterarguments, and fallacy charges, in order to contribute to the dialogical approach to argumentation. We shall make use of four parameters to characterize distinct types of critical reaction. First, a critical reaction has a focus, for example on the standpoint, or on another part of an argument. Second, critical reactions appeal to some kind of norm, argumentative or other. Third, they each have a particular illocutionary force, which may include that of giving strategic advice to the other. Fourth, a critical reaction occurs at a particular level of dialogue (the ground level or some meta-level). The concepts here developed shall be applied to discussions of critical reactions by Aristotle and by some contemporary authors.

‘In Context’ is aimed at giving contextualization its rightful place in the study of argumentation. First, Frans H. van Eemeren explains the crucial role of context in a reconstructive analysis of argumentative discourse. He distinguishes four levels of contextualization. Second, he situates his approach to context in the field of argumentation studies by comparing it with Walton’s approach. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing clearly between a normatively motivated theoretical ideal model and empirically-based communicative activity types. Third, van Eemeren concentrates on the ‘macro-level’ of contextualization: contextualization in institutionalized communicative activity types. He makes clear that the macro-context of a communicative activity type can be characterized argumentatively by describing the disctinctive features of the empirical counterparts of the four stages of a critical discussion in the activity type concerned. Fourth, he points out what the consequences of the macrocontextualization of argumentative discourse in a certain communicative activity type are for the strategic maneuvering that may takes place and the identification of fallacies as derailments of strategic maneuvering. Fifth, van Eemeren draws some general conclusions regarding the role of contextualization in the analysis and evaluation of argumentative discourse.

Book Review| May 01 2011 Review: Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America, by Mark Longaker Mark LongakerRhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. xx + 266 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1547-4 Rhetorica (2011) 29 (2): 208–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.2.208 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America, by Mark Longaker. Rhetorica 1 May 2011; 29 (2): 208–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.2.208 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A study of scholarly research articles from six disciplines provides insights about academic writing that composition instructors can use to prepare students to write across the curriculum.

Through her reading of the editors' introduction and ensuing four essays, Hesford approaches human rights as a discourse of public persuasion that envisions certain scenes of sociopolitical recognition, normative notions of subject formation, and paradoxical particularities. She joins contributors in their interrogation of the normative scenes of sociopolitical recognition on which the human rights paradox of exclusive universalism rests. Yet, she also maintains that in our efforts to construe a more inclusive human rights history that we are mindful of distinctions between the rhetorical tactics of individuals and social movements and differences of geopolitical scale and scope.

What can be said in the aftermath? Faced with legacies of conflict and the gross violation of human rights, the contemporary discourse of transitional justice has defended the work of confession as a way for deeply divided societies to “come to terms” with the past and move forward. Underwritten by a complex promise of recognition, this call for confessional truth-telling has proven controversial, not least at it risks undermining the testimony of victims and granting undue status to perpetrators. Giving voice to events that may prove unspeakable and performing a subjectivity that may defy accountability, the figure of confession imagined by transitional justice is perhaps best envisioned as a rhetorical question, a difficult inquiry into the response-ability of language in the wake of violence.

ABSTRACT Traditional readings of Nietzsche's essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” tend to emphasize the clash between philosophy and rhetoric in the form of two distinct personae—the intuitive, Sophistical artist who embraces the rhetorical power of language to create and destroy on the one hand, and the rational, Stoic philosopher who uses concepts to order the world into a block universe on the other. However, I argue that his essay presents us with not two characters but three—the Stoic philosopher, political rhêtôr, and the Dionysian artist. Furthermore, none of these three characters can be said to be representative of Nietzsche's attitude toward the Sophists. This article thus proposes a model of the Sophistical artist which combines aspects from each of these personae in a way that brings together the power of tragic suffering, persuasive word, and passionate music, respectively. This reading of Nietzsche's work discloses an ideal image of a “new” Sophist as an unfettered spirit for whom Dionysian music and philosophical word cooperate to produce a complex rhetorical discourse capable of overcoming the nihilism of the modern age in order to produce a higher culture. This attitude would therefore make the new Sophist capable of grand aspirations and opportune actions while always remaining cognizant of the sublime and terrible nature that underlies his fragile dreams of beauty.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the interplay between the Stoic concept of cosmopolis and Greek rhetorical discourses of the polis in the Roman imperial period. D. A. Russell's “Sophistopolis” (from Greek Declamation, 1983) and Doyne Dawson's work on utopian political theory (1992) serve as points of departure for developing a method of reading the political in Second Sophistic rhetoric. The text under examination is a major first-century oration: Dio Chrysostom's Euboean Discourse. Composed around 96 CE, after Dio's return from exile by Domitian, the Euboicus combines a castaway's rural fable with didactic commentary, forcing the utopian pastoral hard up against a lecture on economic and social distress in the imperial city. Dio creates disjunctive moods, city-visions, and speaking personae, performing a rhetorical tour de force while simultaneously constructing a political subject at the limit of creaturely need. A “cosmopolitical” analysis of Second Sophistic rhetoric finds the consummate artistry of the paideia addressed to imperial power and provincial realities, revealing civic breakdown and human suffering in the city-spaces of empire.

This study uses fieldwork to investigate the sponsorship of legal literacy within a court mediation program. This examination of institutional involvement in literacy sponsorship demonstrates the ideological nature of literacy by showing the importance of context, investigating literacybased relationships, and uncovering the intertwined nature of oral and written forms of discourse. Little research so far has examined the sponsor’s perspective on literacy, and this study also examines how sponsors may accrue and distribute benefits. Further, the study explicates an approach to literacy sponsorship through mediation which, while still embedded with disparate power relations, may provide an equitable literacy sponsorship model for other community organizations.

Students' writing of parody can provide a more persuasive vehicle than conventional academic writing to move students from their intuitive awareness of irony to critical analysis of rhetorical strategies. Combining parody writing with strong critical reflection can encourage a more complex view of language choices, audience identification, genres, and persuasion.

This study explores how different kinds of arguments are situated in academic contexts and provides an analysis of undergraduate writing assignments. Assignments were collected from the schools of business, education, engineering, fine arts, and interdisciplinary studies as well as the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences in the College of Arts and Science. A total of 265 undergraduate writing assignments from 71 courses were analyzed. Assignments were reliably categorized into these major categories of argumentative writing: explicitly thesis-driven assignments, text analysis, empirical arguments, decision-based arguments, proposals, short answer arguments, and compound arguments. A majority of writing assignments (59%) required argumentation. All engineering writing assignments required argumentation, as did 90% in fine arts, 80% of interdisciplinary assignments, 72% of social science assignments, 60% of education assignments, 53% in natural science, 47% in the humanities, and 46% in business. Argumentation is valued across the curriculum, yet different academic contexts require different forms of argumentation.

In an increasingly globalized world, writing courses, situated as they are in local institutional and rhetorical contexts, need to prepare writers for global writing situations. Taking introductory technical communication in the United States as a case study, this article describes how and to what extent global perspectives are incorporated into writing. Based on an analysis of eight textbooks and a closer analysis of four of them, we illustrate the representation of technical communication and communicators as well as multiculturalism and multilingualism in these textbooks and point out the limitations vis-à-vis the cultural and linguistic complexity of global technical communication in today’s world. We conclude by considering implications for U.S. college composition as it continues to contribute to the international discourse of writing studies.

Kenneth Burke’s sociological criticism of literature as “equipment for living” situates the work of art as a response to a situation that is essentially social; literature serves a therapeutic role insofar as it diagnoses and dissolves maladaptive social categories and orientations. Burke’s complementary notion of “perspective by incongruity” describes the way in which artists push a system of belief or interpretive scheme to its limits by deliberating creating effects which escape its means of formalization. In the work of Gilles Deleuze, we encounter similarly the artist of literature and discourse who assumes the role of a physician of culture and seeks to produce new possibilities for life by multiplying available perspectives for action. In judging whether the rhetorical appeals and interpretive schemes they offer are medicine or poison, our criteria shall be whether they constrain, narrow, or otherwise limit life (gridlock), or whether they provide new possibilities, experiences, and configurations of knowledge for living (counter-gridlock). Through the incongruous imbrications of Burke and Deleuze, we discover a resonant pragmatism in which art, literature, and ethics become something more than tools for refining the ways in which we currently experience the world. Rather, they offer means for a way out of the orientations which configure and constrain our capacity to actualize potentials for a better tomorrow.

Increasingly, rhetoricians are taking notice of the intertwining of “serious” discourse with comedy, humor and satire. Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, for example, includes an array of articles that recognize the “discursive integration” (Baym 2005) of news and politics with comic entertainment. Rather than seeing this integration as a degradation of news into infotainment, Baym sees it as a creative response to the need to make important information competitively appealing in the “televisual sphere” of a post-modern consumer economy. But does the framing of journalism and politics as humor or clowning leave room for the possibility of serious, constructive action?

This article uses Foucault's enunciative analysis and stasis theory to explore the rhetorical work of the Midwest Pain Group (MPG) as its members struggle to collaborate across disciplinary difference to transform the discourse and practice of pain science. Foucault's enunciative analysis explains how discourse formations regulate statements, but not how formations can be transformed. We argue that stases can be thought of as nodes in the networks of statements Foucault describes and that stasis theory explains the rhetorical means through which members of the MPG work to transform the discourse of pain science. As the members of the MPG confront the epistemological incommensurability that exists between their individual disciplines, they establish a meta-discourse in which the definitional and jurisdictional stases help them invent a new definitional topos. We describe the way this rhetorical work occurs “off- label” in violation of the discursive restrictions of scientific disciplines, regulatory agencies, and insurance institutions.

This essay examines the rhetorical education that late-nineteenth-century women received at California State Normal School. The article complicates Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's claim that during the nineteenth century, rhetorical theory and practice shifted from an oratorical to a professional culture by considering how gender, class, and region affected this transformation. Building on the research of Beth Ann Rothermel, this analysis also reveals that although experimentation concerning women's gender roles occurred in the northeast, it was more sustained in the West. California women generally faced fewer gender constraints than did women in northeastern state normal schools and were provided with more opportunity to learn typically masculine discourse practices.

Abstract RateMyProfessors.com has received critical reception in the academy: While some college teachers and administrators express support for the site, others complain that it invades their privacy and impinges on their academic freedom. This essay looks closely at one response to Rate My Professors, a weblog titled Rate Your Students that was founded in 2005. The site offers a compelling example of how Rate My Professors—and the movement to commodify higher education that it represents—affects public discourse between students and teachers. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Duane Roen and Edward White as well as Dana Anderson, Theresa Enos, Christine Farris, Joan Pong Linton, and John Schilb, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 2With a masthead that reads "Plagiarism, misery, colleagues, absinthe, snowflakes, ennui," Rateyourstudents.blogspot.com has hosted academic complaints about students multiple times a week since 2005. As of June 2010, the site closed down after five years, citing insufficient staffing as the primary cause. The original website still maintains a limited archive of its first five years. A spin-off site called CollegeMisery.com opened its doors at the same time. Both sites regularly accept and post reader comments about the drudgeries of academia, peppering them with bits of news and commentary related to higher education. Although the site's content is now somewhat more diverse than it was in the earlier years (not all posters are now attacking students, and some even defend them) the blog's initial inflammatory rhetoric has attracted attention and even inspired debate. However, the site itself is still strongly framed as a space for virulent and personalized critiques of students. 3In this essay I organize my thinking about publics according to Michael Warner's three definitions: the public as social totality (what Elizabeth Ervin terms in Public Literacy as the national public), the public as concrete audience, and the "public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation" (Warner 50). Warner focuses on the third type of public, as will I in this essay. A textual public is self-organized through discourse and operates independently of structuring institutions such as the state or church. Such a public is maintained through the circulation of discourse, and one can become, even temporarily, a part of that public simply by accepting its address (61). There is then not just one public but many that overlap and intersect at local, national, and global levels. Publics represent a heterogeneous range of context and group-specific interests and values, and they are maintained through the circulation of discourse that is both personal and impersonal—that addresses us (if we accept the address) and some group of imagined strangers beyond us. 4While I want to adopt this textual understanding of public formation for the purposes of this essay, I also do not want to lose sight of what David Kaufer and Amal Mohammed Al-Malki recently refer to in their analysis of the Arab-American press as the material embodiment of counterpublics (50). Drawing on work by Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, and others, Kaufer and Al-Malki remind us that oppressed groups generate resistant and/or self-protective rhetoric in counterpublic spaces, offering insight into how power differentials between groups structure the terms of their participation in publics. Based on this understanding, I also define publics in this essay as not purely textual but also importantly connected to embodied experience and unequally positioned in relationship to cultural power, often in ways that place them in a contested relation to one another. However, as my analysis of the interaction of RMP and RYS indicates, public power differentials do not always manifest directly in the embodied presence of the actors involved; rather, power dynamics are written into the structures that mediate a public's textual circulation. 5The exaggeratedly caustic and insulting rhetorical postures of participants in RYS are certainly legible as a kind of Menippean satire, one that indirectly buffoons student rhetoric on Rate My Professors and the attitudes it implies. By returning the volley of character assassination begun by RMP, posters reveal some measure of the childish irresponsibility inherent in the rhetoric itself. Yet, while I do think there is certainly a relationship of subtle satire at work in the interaction between these two sites, I do not choose to concentrate on this relationship in my analysis but rather to look beneath it at the more lasting and meaningful public investment that posters on RYS seem to be expressing in their work. 6Nancy Fraser provides a crucial foundation for this point in her critique of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of the public sphere. Fraser contends that Habermas's concept of the universal public actually emerged in conflict with a variety of counterpublics, which themselves represented the interests of oppressed groups who could not meet the minimal expectations of property ownership and disembodiment, which were requirements for participation in the so-called liberal bourgeoisie public sphere. In imposing dominant interests as universal and seeking to delimit the terms of what could be civilly debated (and in what language), the bourgeois liberal public sphere in fact represented a larger shift from more openly autocratic to hegemonic forms of social control (Fraser 62). While Fraser is most often credited for rendering Habermas's concept of the public as a plural one, her critical intervention more pointedly challenges the vaguely positive connotations usually associated with public dialogue. Far from being an open forum for meaningful civic discussion, Fraser finds that the so-called public sphere is a veil of rationality that kept more divisive forms of social conflict out of view. 7In her article Welch persuasively argues that we err as teachers when we present public writing and rhetoric as an individual activity. According to Welch, seeing public action as individual dangerously isolates students and makes them less able to effectively confront the complexities of privatized public space. 8My analysis of the site layout was written in the spring of 2007, and the homepage of RateMyProfessors has since changed. 9The method of purposeful sampling is, I maintain, appropriate to the site and my inquiry alike. Obtaining a random sample from a site like RMP would be not just impossible but unnecessary, since I do not aim to make generalizable claims about the broader student population as a result of my analysis. I do want to make claims about how the site structures a kind of public discourse through consumerism, and a purposeful sample is more than adequate to that task.

In The Long Road of Woman's Memory, Addams develops a theory of memory that accounts for the rhetorical function of reminiscence. Drawing on I. A. Richards's conception of rhetoric as the study of misunderstanding, this essay offers an analysis of Addams's theory in relationship to her attempts at rational discourse with a group of immigrant women who believed there was a “Devil Baby” in residence at Hull House. Her successes and failures during these conversations prompted Addams to consider the rhetorical function of memory as a theoretical tool both to understand and remedy discursive conflict.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 So, this phrase has gotten a lot of attention. First during and immediately after the Octalog panel in the Tweetstream, then in f2f and continuing social-media interactions after. Most younger scholars express excitement to hear someone say what they've been thinking all along; many "established" scholars express dismay at my lack of respect. Disciplinarity does do its job, does it not? 2 I will, however, offer my definition of rhetoric. Just for the record, when I use the word rhetoric, I am evoking a shorthand that encompasses thousands of years of intellectual production all over the globe—a set of productions that we have only just begun to understand—and that generally refers to systems of discourse through which meaning was, is, and continues to be made in a given culture. 3 In Signs Taken for Wonders, Homi Bhabha reminds us that "[t]here is a scene in the cultural writings of English colonialism which repeats so insistently" that it "inaugurates a literature of empire." That scene, he tells us, is always "played out in the wild and wordless wastes" of "the colonies" and consists entirely of the "fortuitous discovery of the English book" by colonized peoples; this scene marks the book as an "emblem," one of the colonizers' "signs taken for wonders" (29). 4 See especially Lisa Brooks; Joy Harjo; Thomas King; Nancy Shoemaker (ed.); Linda Tuhiwai Smith; Robert Warrior; and Shawn Wilson. 5 For an examination of "paracolonial," see Vizenor. 6 A totally unsatisfying and provocative opening into my current work that argues for situating specific rhetorical events in the continuum of rhetorical practices (alphabetic and non-alphabetic) that hold particular cultures together over time. 7 I take inspiration from Richard Graff and Michael Leff; Thomas Habinek; Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille Schultz; and Susan Miller. 8 See http://wealthforcommongood.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ShiftingResponsibility.pdf for more information. 9 For Jim and Bob … Susan, Sharon, Richard, Jan, Nan, and Jerry (chair), Octalog, 1988, St. Louis. 10 Éthea, where animals belong, in their wildness. I'm using Charles Scott's The Question of Ethics for reading, as CS cites such in the Iliad (6.506–11). The horse wants to return to its Nomós, field, as opposed to Nómos, law (Scott 143). I've consulted Charles Chamberlain's "From Haunts to Character." 11 I would claim, therefore, that it is our responsibility to search out our other-abilities, our impotentialities, to address the other that is indefinite. I'm not referring to potentialities, that is, Techné or Dynamis. Rather, I am referring to what Aristotle notes only in passing as Adynamis, or Impotentiality (see Metaphysics 1046e, 25–32). This, then, would be the para-methodology of misology! As well as the wildness that I refer to! In reference, as Giorgio Agamben says, Adynamis, or Impotentiality, would address all that has NOT YET been intuited, thought, acted on in ethico-political lived experiences (see Potentialities). Or forgotten! At least, in our wide, impotentially wild field.

218 RHETORICA Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 158 pp. ISBN 9780226777481 This book is not easy to characterize. In Rhetoric, Modality, Moder­ nity Nancy Struever shapes over a decade of methodological reflection on Hobbes, Vico, Peirce, and Heidegger into a bold historical argument about the limits of philosophy and our most basic modes of being. Methodologi­ cally Struever is closest to C. S. Peirce on beliefs that generate habits of action and Bernard Williams on the limits of philosophy, but ultimately her project exceeds both because it mobilizes rhetoric first, and thus it narrates from the margins with utterly novel results for our understanding of rhetorical topics, inquiry modes, politics, and history. Within the field of rhetorical studies per se Struever's work is polemic in so far as it argues the contempo­ rary historiography of rhetoric is "the location of speculative vigor" rather than the practice (p. 98). In terms of rhetoric and philosophy the work of Michel Meyer is probably closest, though Struever's historical erudition dis­ tinguishes her work along with uncommon familiarity in Anglo-American, French, German, and Italian scholarship. Though she wastes no time rehears­ ing the standard intellectual biographies or reviewing the marginal literature, Struever builds crucial elements of her argument from the ground up, defin­ ing her terms carefully and summarizing periodically'. When Struever tells us "any study of modality must attempt to deal with rhetorical operations; any rhetorician must refine his definitions of modalitv" (p. 73) we must take her seriously indeed. Struever gives us a fresh Hobbes and Vico, now central to the modern project understood in terms of new styles of inquiry, while at the same time explaining why Hobbes and Vico have been marginalized in a tradition of political philosophy that starts from the presuppositions of moral rectitude. On Struever's polemic reading, Hobbes and Vico "could challenge, from within the Anglophone, or Western, discussion, the begged questions of the hegemonous terms and propositions: an exasperating hegemony that seems planetary" (p. 66). Discreet references to "tolerance, complexity" (p. 67) distinguish her treatment of these "pessimistic" figures—especially Hobbes—from the Straussian trajectory most recently articulated in Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgnieiit, but more could be said. Along the way Struever takes a stab at theoretical debates around agency, showing cleverly with Hobbes how "will" is procedural and how the "impersonal" does not mean without personality (pp. 42, 54). Starting with Hobbes' crucial bridge concept "natural logic" (p. 33) Struever articulates the relationship between life science, rhetoric (as social science broadly understood), and modality (typically associated with ab­ stract domains of logic, mathematics, grammar theory). But how is Struever's life science (p. 15) distinguished from the Lebensphilosophie ridiculed by Heidegger in his rhetoric lectures that provide Struever a critical touch­ stone (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophic: Marburger Vorlesun^ Som­ mer Semester 1924)7 Struever offers a nice explanation when she shows how Reviews 219 the animal account for Hobbes "reveals another, possible world of great explanatory value; its force trumps, its plots encompass narratives of Hu­ manistic capacity" (p. 18). In other words the human/non-human is topical (among other things), not just a matter of some extra-physical vitalis. We get another intriguing formulation when Struever writes "the web of political life is an emotional, but also a problematic, uncertain texture" (p. 19) sug­ gesting how a vibrant life science would make room for political possibility undeterred by the human/nonhuman divide. Thus Struever clearly moves beyond statistics and philosophical modality insofar as the field is subject to evaluation: "Possibility as realized in time, fills time: gives it significance and pathos in the accounts of the direction and force of civil movements" (p. 71). Fields of possibility are subject to "the essential rhetorical task of praise and blame" (p. 73) which is to say epideictic. And with this turn to epideictic rhetoric we are reminded of a traditional claim critiqued by Jeffrey Walker in Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity: prag­ matic discourse or what can be seen as civic oratory is the primary form of rhetoric in its preconceptual state, before it emerges into history...

206 RHETORICA côté du marchand, du ménestrel, ou du pèlerin reste toujours l'impécunieux poète. Ainsi, de la vantardise des troubadours belligérants aux monologues des valets à louer, MJ tisse un réseau de significations, où la liste n est plus tant un trope qu'un outil conceptuel qui permet de renouveler la connais­ sance de ces poètes. Le lecteur peut regretter la place un peu trop grande que prend la figure du poète devant la question plus proprement rhétorique ou poétique du fonctionnement de la liste; il peut regretter la composition mo­ nographique des derniers chapitres et les choix qu'elle conditionne (corpus des fabliaux très rapidement évoqué). Mais, il ne peut, en dernière analyse, que reconnaître la finesse, la pertinence et l'utilité des analyses autant pour le médiéviste que pour celui qui travaille sur d'autres époques. Catherine Nicolas Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier III) Srividya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759-1815. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. xiii + 245pp. ISBN 9780754667674 The proliferation of scholarship on the multi-national and multi-era debate over slavery, on the part of scholars from multiple disciplines, has created an embarrassment of riches; because there is so much scholarship, work tends to specialize by country, era, genre, method, and topos. That is, with the exception of David Brion Davis' extraordinary work, scholars gener­ ally write about the debate over the slave trade or the abolition of slavery, and almost always within a single nation. And they generally further specialize by focusing on the proslavery or antislavery position, most commonly the latter. Finally, although the slavery debate itself violated generic categories— with poems, plays, sermons, political speeches, paintings, and songs either attacking or defending slavery—scholarship has most commonly accepted a visual versus verbal split, as well as a split within written discourse between literary and political discourse. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, students of the slavery debates are currently well-served in terms of specific studies, but have fewer broad brush treatments. While Srividya Swaminathan's Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric ofBritish National Identity, 1759—1815 can hardly be called broad brush—one of its many virtues is the grounding of her arguments in close textual analysis— it does transcend many of the boundaries that unhappily limit the area. A study of the debate within Britain, the book places that debate within the larger context of the debate within and from the colonies, as well as the burgeoning anti-slavery movement in the United States. As well as polemical pamphlets, slave narratives, speeches, and sermons, Swaminathan considers Reviews 207 literary texts such as Mary Birkett's A Poem oil the African Slave Trade, James Boswell's No Abolition of Slavery, and the collection Poems on the abolition of the slave trade. Briefly, Swaminathan s book has two significant points for scholars of the history of rhetoric. First, her work nicelv complicates the pro- and antislavery dichotomy. She is very persuasive that there was, after a certain point, very little true "proslavery" rhetoric in the British debate, and that, therefore, the term "regulationist" is a much more accurate one. That is, defenders of the slave trade initially tried to denv the brutality of the conditions in which slaves were transported, but quickly abandoned that approach. They moved to the argument that there were flaws in current practices, but that they could be ameliorated, that better regulation would sufficiently improve conditions. In effect, they tried to coopt the language of reform—the very discourse on which abolitionists relied so heavily—by arguing for reforming rather than abolishing the slave trade. Second, she argues that, while the abolitionists were politically success­ ful in achieving the abolition of the slave trade and then the abolition of slavery within Britain, to describe the end result of the debate in purely po­ litical terms, or to attribute causality solely to the abolitionists, is to miss the larger cultural consequences of the arguments made by both sides. Instead, Swaminathan argues, the slavery debate was framed as an issue about the identity of the British and the nature of their empire: "The dialogue...

208 RHETORICA appears to have read every relevant primary and secondary text, so that the book serves as an excellent introduction to the topic. A further virtue of Swaminathan's book is that it elegantly models how rhetorical and literary analysis can be interwoven for a nuanced presentation of the complexities of social change. The puzzle about slavery is, as Swaminathan says, that "Great Britain dismantled this profitable trade, albeit unevenly and in a fraught manner, seemingly for the benefit of principle" (p. 213). It is a striking instance of effective rhetoric. Yet, it was not a case of a single text having done that considerable cultural work. Although some texts might have been more popular, and possibly more effective, than others, the abolitionists were successful because of a long series of arguments and counterarguments. They were successful because various topoi were repeated across genres, and not just in what we traditionally think of as "political" discourse. The book usefully reminds us of the breadth of rhetoric, and, hence, the potential breadth of rhetorical scholarship. Patricia Roberts-Miller University of Texas, Austin Mark Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. xx + 266 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1547-4 While in the past five years we have seen a number of books chal­ lenging and diversifying our understanding of rhetorical education in late nineteenth-century United States, including David Gold's Rhetoric at the Mar­ gins: Revising the History ofWriting Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947, Jessica Enoch's Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African Amer­ ican, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865—1911, and Brian Fehler's Calvinist Rhetoric in Nineteenth-Century America. The Bartlet Professors of Sa­ cred Rhetoric ofAndover Seminary, relatively little work has examined rhetor­ ical education within colonial America. Indeed, Mark Garrett Longaker's Rhetoric and the Republic is likely the most important work to do so since Thomas P. Miller's The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Unlike works bv Gold or Enoch, the primary virtue of Longaker s research does not come from his examining underrep­ resented communities, nor does his work take us to different parts of the university as does Fehler s. Rather, Longaker's work is important because it asks us to fundamentally reexamine our historiography at the same time that it challenges us to think harder about some of our pedagogical practices. Revising accounts by Miller, Halloran, and Clark (Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric), Longaker argues that "early American republicanism was a con­ tested political terrain" which allowed for a number of conflicting peda­ Reviews 209 gogical ideals and practices to emerge in its name (p. xviii). This historical narrative in turn allows Longaker to demonstrate the anemia of the republi­ can revival which has been championed by both contemporary American academics and politicians alike. Since at least the 1950s, scholars represent­ ing various disciplines have called for a revival of civic republican political discourses as a counterweight to the hegemony of liberal political discourse. Indeed, in the United States, civic republicanism represented something of an academic third way between Soviet-inspired communist totalitarianism and American-inspired liberal capitalism. Whereas liberalism promoted negative liberty, legal proceduralism, and the interest of autonomous individuals, re­ publicanism promoted positive liberty, substantive values, and civic virtue. Finding a way of reviving civic republicanism would help revive active citi­ zenship, or so we believed. But the truth of the matter has always been that the sharp division between republicanism and liberalism was itself a prod­ uct of the Cold War, and one that was unsustainable when examining the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, a point Longaker brings home especially well in his analvsis of John Witherspoon. Oddly enough, Longaker never makes that argument explicitly and in­ stead spends most of his book demonstrating, through the use of Gramscian articulation theory, the various ways early American republican theory lent itself to very different political and economic discourses. So much the better for us, the real value of the book as far as this reader is...

Abstract The Stoic is often seen as the forerunner of Adam Smith's market man of morals, but others have suggested that the sophist played a role in the formation of market morality and political economy. This article traces Smith's treatment of ancient sophists and his use of the term sophistry in the Wealth of Nations. Smith praised ancient sophists for their effective didactic oratory and their ability to make money through teaching. Smith criticized arguments as sophistic when they promoted monetary advantage for a few over and above the principle of competition. This varied reception of sophists and sophistry suggests a keen understanding of the rhetorical tradition and its capacity to influence the development of the discourse of political economy. Smith's use of sophistry and reference to the sophists invites a deeper awareness of the essential vitality of effective argumentation for Smith's “system of natural liberty.”

108 RHETORICA thinkers? No wonder Kirby opines “Quot lectores, tot Platones": There are as many Platos as there are readers of him. McCoy's reading of various dialogues is "partial" both in the sense of partisan and less-than-the-whole. But so are all readings of Plato. To disagree with McCoy over particulars strikes me as simply reflecting the fact that her Plato is not my Plato. I suspect many readers may be persuaded that the most consistent means by which Plato distinguishes sophists from philosophers is by their moral purpose without accepting that Plato's account is true (something McCoy does not claim), and perhaps insisting that the most compelling reading of certain dialogues requires us to accept that Plato did, in fact, try to distinguish the two on other grounds, including by method and doctrine. It is to McCoy's credit that she demonstrates familiarity with a broader body of literature than most philosophers who deal with Plato. Readers of Rhetorica will appreciate McCoy's account as a healthy counterpart to the long tradition ofbooks by philosophers that take every opportunity to equate sophists and rhetoric to the detriment of both. Her book should encourage historians of rhetoric who have not examined certain dialogues as part of the canon of rhetorical theory to include a greater variety of Plato's texts. Lastly, by portraying Plato as a sophisticated rhetor, McCoy facilitates a more candid assessment of what she describes as his most consistent theme. After all, if one does not believe in the forms (that is, if one is not a Platonist), then the only difference between sophist and philosopher is the latter's authentic concern for other people. The fact that Plato's rhetoric privileges Socrates in this regard no longer seems a compelling reason for us to do the same. Edward Schiappa University ofMinnesota Casper C. de Jonge, Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Hali­ carnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Mnemosyne Supple­ ments 301), Leiden: Brill, 2008. xiii + 456 pp. ISBN 9789004166776 Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek intellectual active in Rome in the last decades of the first century bce. Not all of his writings have survived, but those that do include (as well a lengthy work on Roman history) a substantial and interesting corpus of literary and rhetorical criticism, including studies of the classical orators and Thucydides, and a treatise on style (On Composition). Modern scholarship has often treated him with scant respect, but he has begun to be taken more seriously in recent decades. Building on that work, and contributing a distinctive anci original approach of his own, de Jonge has achieved a remarkable further advance in our understanding. His focus is on Dionysius' integration of ideas from the whole range of language disciplines—philology, technical grammar, philosophy Reviews 109 and rhetoric; metrics and musical theory also make appearances, though they are less central to de Jonge's enquiry. After an introductory chapter, de Jonge examines Dionysius' general conception of the nature of language; his treatment of the grammatical theory of the parts of speech, and his critical application of this theory; the theory of natural word-order; similarities and differences between poetry and prose; and Dionysius' use of experimental alterations to word order (metathesis, or "transposition") as a tool of practical criticism. One of the study's aims is to use Dionysius as a source for the state of the language disciplines in the late first century (for the most part known only from sparse fragments), and in particular to illustrate the close connections between these disciplines. But in reconstructing the intellectual context of Dionysius' work, de Jonge prudently resists the temptations (traditionally irresistible to classicists) of Quellenforschung: "instead of assigning partic­ ular passages from Dionysius' works to specific 'sources', I will point to the possible connections between Dionysius' discourse and that of earlier and contemporary scholars of various backgrounds" (pp. 7-8). This restraint does not preclude good observations on specific influences: in particular, there is a powerful argument for the view that Dionysius had read, and been influenced by, Cicero (p. 15, pp. 215-16). A second methodological commitment is the adoption of an "external rather than an...

This paper discusses an ongoing research-based collaboration between an academic literacies researcher and a lecturer in the field of Social Work aimed at exploring the nature of everyday writing in social work. The paper outlines the key principles of the methodology adopted—a text-oriented ethnography—and discusses the extent to which this methodology is facilitating a collaborative partnership towards meeting three interrelated goals: the empirical goal of building rich descriptions of writing in everyday social work practice; the ideological-epistemological goal of challenging a deficit discourse on writing (and writers); and the interventionist goal of working with institutions to harness writing in productive ways to learning and professional practice. Central to this methodological approach is an attempt to build a three-way conversation between the fields of 'new' literacy studies, in particular academic literacies; the discipline of social work education; and social work agencies/practitioners. We outline the methodology and foreground some key congruencies across these fields which are helping to facilitate successful collaboration.

Thanks to the recent developments in the theory of academic discourse analysis, it is now increasingly accepted that negotiation of academic knowledge is intimately related to the social practices of academic communities. To underpin this position and to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, this article analyzes a relatively wide spectrum of academic texts (20 research articles, 20 handbook chapters, 20 scholarly textbook chapters, and 20 introductory textbook chapters) in applied linguistics. The authors show here the importance of establishing social relationships in academic arguments, suggest some of the ways this is achieved, and indicate how the social and institutional differences that underlie production and reception of different academic genres influence the ways metadiscourse is shaped in academic communication.

Drawing on work logs kept by participants, the authors report and analyze a project at their university in which contingent faculty recorded the amount of work they actually performed during a week. The authors also recommend ways to enhance the working conditions of such faculty.

Leary describes an anthologizing assignment that involves collecting and arranging thematically related texts. Students also compose introductions for a complete class-generated publication. The author concludes that this form of “macrocomposition” allows basic writers to participate in discourse about the components of good writing and helps them assert social and literary agency normally reserved for published writers.

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place and journey metaphors (note the metaphor I just used of entering into a community, suggesting it is a place), I posit that ecocomposition theory may provide a fresh lens through which to view classical rhetoric. After providing a read of Aristotle’s Rhetoric focusing on issues of place and ecology, I offer how such theory, which I playfully term “EcoStotle,” might be applicable to a first-year composition course. The benefit to this approach to classical rhetoric and ecocomposition is that it is grounded in argumentation, thereby promoting literacy for our students, whatever discourse community they enter.

This article analyzes the effects of a transparency view of language that is implicit in some technical discourses. Using a legal concept, the excited utterance exception to hearsay, as an exemplary discourse, I show that this view of language is predicated on social norms rather than empirical standards. Indeed, I argue, the measurement of accuracy using an empirical standard creates a situation in which the speaker's rhetorical concerns and the context can be ignored.

Abstract More than ten years after his death, Matthew Shepard is still remembered prominently in LGBT discourse. This discourse has been used to defy heteronormative characterizations of violence, confirm gay and lesbian identity, and to "queer" rigid notions of community. Tracing Shepard s memory through three contested memory frames, I argue for an expanded perspective of queer counterpublic memories and the strategic use of public memories by counterpublics.

Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom Kristie S. Fleckenstein Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability Peter N. Goggin, ed. Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Mark Garrett Longaker The Responsibilities of Rhetoric Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick, eds. Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh, eds.

An argumentative text can be reconstructed as an argumentative discussion between a protagonist and an antagonist. However, such a text is usually not a literal report of a discussion. It is the author of the text who determines how issues are presented, how claims are modeled, how the development of the discussion is presented. Especially when a text has embedded discourse voices that can fulfill the roles of protagonist or antagonist, the author of the text can strongly suggest a specific assignment, suppressing alternatives. In this article examples are presented that show how an author exploits linguistic means—a strategic choice of causal connectives—to suggest a specific reconstruction. The question is raised whether a derailment of this behavior of the author should be characterized as committing the fallacy of the straw man.

In this article, the author takes a close look at the discursive ways that Black and Latina preservice teachers reconcile tensions between their racial and linguistic identities and the construction of teacher identities in the current context of preservice teacher education in the United States.Through the study of language as representative of teacher identities, the author presents a critical discourse analysis of the language and literacy practices of Black and Latina preserviceteachers “all nonstandard language and dialect speakers” across diverse contexts within and beyond the university and school setting. This examination of their literacy and language practices elucidated a move beyond marginalization and inferiority toward agency and linguistic hybridity.

This qualitative research article explores how youth create multimodal rhetoric during a service-learning course at a local youth media organization. The study takes a detailed look at how a group of teens wanted to gain access to the Discourse of the documentary making process but struggled with the confines of conventions of film as were represented by the professional documentary maker who was their instructor. The research combines sociocultural and cognitive research traditions while investigating the teens’ and instructor’s relationship and interactions concerning the production of rhetoric.

This article argues that in spite of some attempts to expand the diversity of approaches in Technical Communication, the field remains rooted in an expedient, managerial, techno-rational discourse, where discourse is understood as the values that guide research, practice, and teaching. The article draws on approaches from Communication Studies, specifically discursive analysis and metaphor analysis, to ground this claim and to demonstrate what possible alternative discourses might be possible. The article then argues that moving toward an “interpretive” discourse will expand the values of Technical Communication, but in a way that both retains existing assumptions but also includes a new focus on the “complete person.” Interpretive discourse is theorized using Habermas' communicative rationality and User Experience Design and the article concludes with some implications about moving Technical Communication toward discursive diversity. Ultimately, the goal of the article is to encourage researchers, teachers, and professionals to embrace this discursive diversity that complicates our historical means-ends rationality.

This study investigates the genre structure of Chinese call-center discourse based on data collected from the call centers of a telecommunication company in China. Using an integrated theoretical framework informed by approaches to genre from English for specific purposes, systemic functional linguistics, and social perspectives, the study focuses on an analysis of the recurrent situation and social practices, the communicative purposes, the move structure, the exchange structure, and the generic-structure potential of call-center communication. A corpus-based quantitative analysis further reveals the dynamic complexity of interaction at call centers. The study compares Chinese and English call-center interactions in order to illustrate universal language functions as well as institutional and cultural differences in this professional discourse. The findings may have implications for both academics and practitioners in the call-center industry.

As more nonprofit organizations take advantage of the ease of creating an online presence, they need to understand the fundamental nature of Web 2.0: its interactivity between writers and readers. The “(un)civil discourse” that often comes from such interactivity results in an inherent lack of control for writers and their organizations. However, the nonprofits that most successfully use Web 2.0 technologies to enhance their missions are those that accept and even embrace this lack of control, finding ways to use it productively to improve their advocacy and empower their supporters and clients.

This article argues that community publishing initiatives might extend the scope and impact of their work by critically examining the ways in which technology influences the production and circulation of their [counter]public discourse. Building upon the work of Paula Mathieu, the author analyzes the material and discursive complexities of the “street paper” movement as a site of community-based publishing, finding both limitations and potential in the survival-driven, print-based, and hyperlocal character of street paper media. Discussing an emerging digital platform for participatory blogging among homeless and low-income street paper vendors, the author suggests how a model of Web-based, multimodal, and interactive communication might work to extend the community literacy practices of the street paper movement.

Much of the scholarship that explores the democratizing potential of the Internet begins with an assumption that ideal public discourse will appear as on-line deliberation; it seeks out discussion forums on issues-based and community-oriented websites to examine whether strangers come together in these spaces to deliberate about public concerns. This article questions the focus on deliberation by looking at the social networking practices of a local non-profit. Miriam’s Kitchen, which serves meals to homeless individuals in Washington DC, actively engages many followers and fans through their Twitter and Facebook feeds, but their social networking does not set out to encourage deliberation among homeless and housed people. Nevertheless, the essay argues, their on-line rhetorical work should be understood as the work of public-formation. The essay analyzes the local contexts and participants—including, in this case, the constantly public lives of chronically homeless individuals—and considers how social networking offers people a new tool in public formation: the power of circulation.

This article deals primarily with the issue(s) of student engagement and technology by examining two YouTube videos, both posted by professor of cultural anthropology Michael Wesch. A critical examination of such texts is both academically revealing and pedagogically useful. By foregrounding the complex interplay of cultural attitudes towards technology, progress, and the purpose(s) of education, scholars and teachers may fruitfully engage students in both the critical study and composition of multi-modal texts. As a gesture in that direction, I view the larger issue of public discourse through the lens of Patricia Roberts-Miller’s taxonomy of models of the public sphere, and Jacques Ranciere’s notion of the distribution of the sensible.

Distributed work is an increasingly common phenomenon in a number of technical and professional settings, and the complexity of this work requires high degrees of knowledge sharing and integration that move beyond assembly-line approaches to collaboration. Since participants in distributed-work settings rely almost exclusively on written and spoken language to mediate their collaborative relationships, professional communication faculty need educational approaches that empower students with language practices designed specifically to support effective teaming in these complex environments. To address this need, we employ discourse analysis and Speech Act Theory to identify these language practices in a case study of two cohorts of distributed, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural student teams. The findings show correlations between language practices and successful collaboration. These correlations have significant implications for teaching and practice.

This article presents the results of a case study of civic discourse and explores whether and how composition classrooms can prepare students for active and informed participation in civic discourse.