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May 2015

  1. Front Matter
    doi:10.1525/rh.2015.33.2.fm
  2. Back Matter
    doi:10.1525/rh.2015.33.2.bm
  3. Conditions for writing to learn
    Abstract

    This paper is a response to an invitation from the editors of the special issue to comment on the ingredients of effective writing to learn interventions as reflected in the contributions to the special issue. The six papers in the issue vary widely in approach and underlying theoretical frameworks but share the broad common theme of writing to learn. Within this, they vary along three main dimensions: (i) how learning is defined and assessed, and in particular whether they assess effects of the writing intervention on content knowledge; (ii) related to this, whether they are primarily focussed on discipline specific skills or on more general effects of writing; and (iii) whether they are designed to carry out a controlled evaluation of the writing intervention or rather are concerned with describing the design and purpose of a specific intervention. In what follows, I will first consider the general characteristics of the papers in relation to these three dimensions. I will then reflect on the findings of the individual papers, and then conclude by relating the papers to my personal understanding of writing to learn in terms of a dual-process model of writing.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2015.07.01.09
  4. Rhetorical Agency in the Face of Uncertainty
    Abstract

    Living with global terrorism, global epidemics, and new medical technologies has made risk a dominant theme in the 21st century in terms of both individual action and public policy.This condition has led us to become more occupied with debating, preventing, and managing risks.Risk Society, 1996 Any time we read or watch the news, the global, scientifically saturated nature of the world becomes apparent.Current events pertaining to medical risks in particular have become increasingly significant.Take, for example, the recent Ebola situation in which we have witnessed how infectious disease threat and communication of risk ignite and stoke public frenzy about how to act and whom to blame.Think of the news coverage on whether the "infected Dallas nurse and other innocent bystanders vulnerable to contracting Ebola.Also consider the treatment politically issuedwent for a bike ride.Perceptions of harm get encased in public talk where case scenario" storylines not only dominate and d but also lead to action.In this regard, and in response to her quarantine orders specifically, the

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1225
  5. Information for Authors
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201527226
  6. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201527239
  7. Author-Title Index: Volume 42
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201527242
  8. Guest Reviewers
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201527241
  9. Guest Reviewers
    doi:10.58680/rte201527353
  10. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/rte201527352
  11. Announcements and Calls for Papers
    doi:10.58680/ce201527178
  12. From the Editor
    Abstract

    Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/5/collegeenglish27173-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce201527173

April 2015

  1. Acknowledgments
    Abstract

    This special issue marks years of research and inquiry on the rhetoric of freedom and dissent in the pre- and post-1989 global context. Many of the ideas in this issue have been discussed and developed during conferences and seminars on Communism and post-Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, on rhetoric and freedom in South Africa and Tibet, as well as on discursive perspectives on history and the politics of domination in the final decades of the twentieth century.The editors of this special issue want to express their deep gratitude to Robert N. Gaines, the general editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric (2003[#x02013]2011), whose unconditional support and relevant comments made possible a series of publications on this topic, building up to this publication, which marks twenty-five years of political and rhetorical change throughout the world.Special thanks to Susan Jarratt, the current president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, who in supporting this project has invited new perspectives on rhetorical research that highlight the complex relationship between history and rhetoric in transitional and transnational political contexts.Grateful acknowledgment is due to Taylor & Francis as well as to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric for its generous publication grant.The editors would also like to thank their respective families (Merrie and John) for editorial support, intellectual stimulation, and moral encouragement.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2015.1010884
  2. Contributors
    Abstract

    Timothy Barney is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond. His scholarship revolves around Cold War–era public address and visual rhetoric (particularly through the medium of cartography) as well as the political culture of post–Cold War transitions in Germany and the Czech Republic. His book, titled Mapping the Cold War, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He is also working on a new project about the European Union and its promotional activities in the United States.András Bozóki is a professor of political science at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. He has published widely in topics of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, Central/Eastern European politics, the transformation of Communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism. His books include Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), and Virtual Republic (2012). He has taught at Columbia University, Tübingen University, Nottingham University, Bologna University, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and, in his native Hungary, Eötvös Loránd University. He has been a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS); the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; the Sussex European Institute in Brighton; and the Institute for Humane Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.Senkou Chou is an affirmative cultural critic. His work bridges rhetoric, media theory, French philosophy, and Chinese culture.Matthew deTar is a visiting assistant professor of rhetoric studies at Whitman College. He recently completed his doctorate in the rhetoric and public culture program at Northwestern University. His research focuses on narratives and figures of public discourse that influence national identity and political speech, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for Turkish Studies at Georgetown University and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University.Jason A. Edwards is an associate professor of communication studies at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Navigating the Post–Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric and coeditor of The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays. In addition, he has authored more than thirty articles and book chapters appearing in venues such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication Quarterly, Southern Journal of Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and The Howard Journal of Communications.Martina Klicperová-Baker is a research fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; she is also affiliated with the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health (C-BEACH), San Diego State University. Her research interests include the psychology of democracy, the psychology of democratic transitions, totalitarian experience, assessment of time perspective, moral behavior, and civility.Noemi Marin is a professor of communication and director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Marin is the author of the book After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times (2007) and contributor to several other books, including Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies (2007); Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diaspora, and Eastern European Voices (2005); Intercultural Communication and Creative Practices (2005); Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations (2000). In addition, she was the coeditor with Cezar M. Ornatowski of the Collocutio section in Advances in the History of Rhetoric in 2006 and 2008–2009. Dr. Marin is the recipient of the 2009 researcher/creative scholar of the year award, Florida Atlantic University, and the 2009 presidential leadership award, Florida Atlantic University; and was named the Fulbright summer institute expert on Eastern Europe in 2003, 2004, and 2011.Cezar M. Ornatowski is a professor of rhetoric and writing studies and is associated faculty in the master of science program in homeland security at San Diego State University. His research includes rhetoric and political transformation (especially in Central/Eastern Europe) as well as intersections between rhetoric, totalitarianism, democracy, and security. In 1999, he was a senior Fulbright research scholar at the Culture Study Unit of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also an honorary fellow of the Center for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.Jane Robinett is a professor emerita of rhetoric and writing studies and English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. Her current research interests include rhetoric and trauma studies; rhetoric and nonviolence; and rhetoric and resistance literature. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Costa Rica in 1993.Philippe-Joseph Salazar was educated at Lycée Lyautey (Casablanca) and Louis-le-Grand (Paris), and is a graduate from École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory under Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. He is a sometime director in rhetoric and democracy at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, founded by Jacques Derrida, and distinguished professor of rhetoric and humane letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a 2009 Laureate recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer award, Africa’s premier research prize, in recognition of his pioneering work in rhetoric studies. His chronicles can be read on http://www.lesinfluences.fr/-Comment-raisonnent-ils-.html and http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/philippejosephsalazar.Anna Szilágyi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a master’s degree in Hungarian language and literature from Eötvös University and a master’s degree in political science from Central European University (both in Budapest, Hungary). She is a multilingual discourse analyst whose research concerns politics, political discourses, media, and journalism in post-Communist Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, especially the rhetorics of nationalism, populism, and far-right radicalism. Her recent publications include “Variations on a Theme: The Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Anti-Semitic Media Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and 2011” (coauthored with András Kovács) in editors Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson’s collection Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York: Routledge, 2013).David Cratis Williams is a professor of communication studies at Florida Atlantic University. His research broadly concerns rhetorical theory and criticism, public argument, and the synergistic connections between rhetoric and democracy. He focuses both on the study of political argument in Russia and on the life and works of Kenneth Burke. Williams is the executive director of both the Eurasian Communication Association of North America and the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation.Marilyn J. Young is the Wayne C. Minnick professor of communication emerita at Florida State University. Her research has focused on political argument with an emphasis on the development of political rhetoric and argument in the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia. She remains an active scholar in retirement.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2015.1010886
  3. Rhetorics and Revolutions: Or, Why Write About 1989?
    Abstract

    Pragmatically, for most of us, “history” consists perhaps primarily of chronotopes, accumulations of symbols and shorthand associations that invest temporality with meaning: 1776, 1848, the 1960s, 1968, 1989. The chronotope 1968, for instance, consists, for many Americans, of symbols of the hippie movement, images of the Chicago Democratic Convention, the escalation of the Vietnam War. For the French, 1968 means primarily the month of May and the student revolt. For Poles, 1968 signifies March: student demonstrations in Warsaw followed by a paroxysm of official anti-Semitism that forced thousands out of their jobs and even out of the country. For Romanians, 1968 represents the political turn away from Moscow, as Nicolae Ceausescu aligned the country with the West in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.1 Each society, regime, generation, perhaps even each locality, group, or family, has its own “time capsules” that to a large extent constitute the shared sense of history.2This special issue attempts to unpack and interrogate, from a variety of rhetorical perspectives, the chronotope of 1989—one of the more significant chronotopes that continues to haunt contemporary history and public discourse. It is also intended to serve as one possible time capsule of reflections on the year 1989.According to the American historian John Lukacs, the year 1989 marks the de facto end of the twentieth century. Lukacs argues that history does not observe neat divisions. The twentieth century did not actually start on January 1, 1901, because nothing happened on that date to make people think they were suddenly living in a different century. It was World War I that ushered in a different era: massive casualties, mass propaganda, the beginnings of “mass society,” the crisis of traditional values, mechanization of death and life, nagging doubts about the “civilizing” value of education and “civilization” itself, and the concomitant beginnings of new intellectual and political trends. Empires and monarchies (Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany, Czarist Russia) that had defined the political order in Europe fell, while a new regime arose in Russia. Both Soviet Communism and German Nazism have their roots in World War I. Between 1914 and 1918, the Western world changed profoundly, only to change again in 1945, and then again in 1989 to 1991.The twentieth century, Lukacs claims, was a “short” century, one characterized by utopian experiments and totalitarian nightmares, punctuated by two of the bloodiest wars and greatest genocides in history, including both the Nazi and Communist genocides. As a direct or indirect result of the former, about 60 million people lost their lives (Romane 2006); as a result of the latter, about 100 million worldwide, including 20 million in the Soviet Union and 1 million in Central/Eastern Europe (Courtois et al. 1999). The century ended with the fall of the Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe in 1989–1990. Anyone who left for Mars in 1983, following the premiere of the film The Day After about the putative nuclear holocaust between the United States and the Soviet Union, would hardly recognize the world a mere decade later. Poland was a fully sovereign country once again, and the European Union was heading toward another extension. Tismaneanu (1992) has called the breakdown of Communist regimes in Central/Eastern Europe “one of the most important events in this [the twentieth] century” (ix).British anthropologist Anthony Cohen has argued that human communities cohere around symbols. Symbols, however, Cohen (1985) argues, “do not so much express meaning” as “give us the capacity to make meaning” (15; emphasis added). They are capacious containers, so to speak, that people invest with a diversity of meanings and interpretations. Human collectivities, Cohen (1985) suggests, share symbols, but they do not necessarily share their meanings. While most Americans, for example, profess the belief in freedom, few could probably agree as to its exact meaning. (Michael McGee [1980] refers to such specifically ideological symbols as ideographs). Cohen (1985) argues that “the reality of ‘community’ in people’s experience inheres in their attachment or commitment to a common body of symbols”; yet “the sharing of symbol is not necessarily the same as the sharing of meaning” (16).Indeed, 1989 has become such a symbol, one whose multiple meanings continue to both unite and divide. While in the West, especially in the United States, 1989 is associated mainly with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, in countries ranging from Russia, Poland, and Romania to China and Tibet its meanings are much more local and diverse, and its symbolic currency and potency in the political field are far from diminished by the passage of more than two decades—in fact, just the opposite. In many of these countries (for instance, in Poland or Romania) attitudes toward 1989 have become a major determinant of political orientation, a key element of public memory, and a clue to the interpretation of the contemporary political scene.In his contribution to this special issue, Philippe-Joseph Salazar captures the dual articulation of such symbolic dates: On the one hand, to date something is to recognize a “moment” as a movement, the passage of a force … [and] on the other hand, a date fixes a “moment” as a static pause, an interval in time. A date carries therefore the force of history, as something hits something else, the dynamic of politics, and the sense we have that, for a date to be imprinted in our experience of the world, some motion has to pass from one to another, through, literally, an act of force and, plainly, violence.The aim of the present issue is thus to interrogate 1989 as both, on the one hand, a fixed moment “imprinted in our experience of the world” and in the memories of its different “stakeholders,” and, on the other hand, as a “movement”—not only a “passage” from one state to another but as a movement, a transformative symbol, that continues to haunt the rhetorical imagination and to animate the political debates in much of Europe and beyond.As a historical moment, 1989 represents not only a revolutionary time—if by revolution one understands “a fundamental, deep change in the social order and organization of the state”—but also as a historical and rhetorical context for a variety of historical experiments, which “did not necessarily have to succeed” (Baczynski 2009, 8).As a metaphor (thus a “figure of perspective,” according to Burke [1966]), 1989 represents a past in perpetual return as a lens for the present, a creative rhetorical space (not unlike anniversaries, which are rhetorical occasions during which narratives and symbols of the past are used to nourish and shape the present, as well as the future).3 As one Polish member of parliament put it almost a year after the transition: “In every national yesterday there is a national today.”4 Indeed, for many Central/Eastern European countries, 1989 remains very much a part of the national today.However, 1989 also constitutes a potent symbol and creative rhetorical space to be exploited in strategic, geopolitical contexts. On June 4, 2014, Poland celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the June 4, 1989, semidemocratic elections that effectively ended Communist domination. The celebrations coincided with the political crisis in Ukraine: the Russian occupation of Crimea and struggle with Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Both U.S. president Barack Obama and Ukrainian president-elect Petr Poroshenko attended, and many Ukrainian flags dotted the crowd in Warsaw’s Castle Square during the main celebration. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in his speech in reference to Ukraine, opening the ubiquitous Polish slogan from the 1980s to a new interpretative twist: solidarity with Ukrainian struggle against Russian aggression. While President-Elect Poroshenko emphasized the analogy between Poland’s Solidarity and the Ukrainian Majdan (a reference to the recent bloody demonstrations on Kiev’s Majdan Square against pro-Russian president Janukovitch), Barack Obama suggested that “the story of this nation [Poland] reminds us that freedom is not guaranteed” and that “the blessings of liberty must be earned and renewed by every generation—including our own. This is the work to which we rededicate ourselves today”; Obama’s words were reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address. “The Ukrainians today are the heirs of Solidarity,” Obama declared, cementing the analogy between the struggles of 1989 and the situation in Ukraine. “There is no freedom without solidarity,” he ended, echoing Komorowski, but now from the geopolitical perspective of an outsider to the region and a world leader.Many of the articles in this issue (Matthew deTar, Senkou Chou) address this symbolic and metaphoric quality of 1989. Others, especially Anna Szilágyi and András Bozóki, note the persistence of the “force of history” contained in the 1989 moment in the post-1989 rhetoric of Viktor Orbán—a “revolutionary” force that, as Bozóki and Szilágyi note, had “once been used to initiate a transition to democracy” and is “now [being] used to complete a constitutional coup d’état against an established democracy.”Dialogue around the events of 1989 often assumes a static Cold War space and then, conversely, some sort of definable post–Cold War space. Yet if we see transition as a process by which political communities and their leaders forge new rhetorical spaces and articulate new visions, as well as create ways to marshal and integrate complex histories into these visions, we gain a richer sense of how profound changes in collective identities and imaginaries are negotiated. This process is, as Cezar M. Ornatowski points out in his contribution, dialectical and rife with multiple ironies. (It is worth remembering here that Kenneth Burke [1969] considered irony to be the master trope of history—an insight borne out by the complex events of the transitions and the complexities of the posttransitional period). Noemi Marin’s contribution proposes rhetorical space as central to the examination of the Romanian 1989 scene, where totalitarian rhetoric enforced by Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime clashes with democratic opposition to redefine Romanian identity. Jason A. Edwards’s contribution investigates how the rhetoric of Slobodan Milosevic modified the national myths of Kosovo as a redemptive argument for the Serb pre-1989 national identity. David Cratis Williams and Marilyn J. Young’s article emphasizes the challenges Soviet/Russian leaders such as Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev faced in finding a suitable lexicon of politics to invent, and articulate, the novel shapes of freedom and democratic life. Their article highlights another rhetorical dimension of the transitions of 1989: the challenge of “shaping freedom.” That challenge, according to Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, proved to be even more difficult than the winning of freedom. “For years,” Mazowiecki (2009) remembers, “it seemed that winning freedom is so dreadfully difficult. Then it turned out that the shaping of freedom is not much easier” (13). Speaking from, and about, another place altogether, Jane Robinett analyzes the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize speech by the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, looking at how the discourse on freedom continues to remain in tension with political histories and cultural narratives that conflate national and nationalistic platforms of public action.The Cold War and the post–Cold War, however we define these terms, do not exist without culturally bound, ideologically explosive, discursive contestations that bring them to life. The transition between these two periods becomes a tense site of ideological struggle between competing articulations of national history, as both Timothy Barney and Martina Klicperová-Baker demonstrate in their articles on Czech pre- and post-1989 political rhetoric. However, as Barney emphasizes in a comment that applies to all the articles in this special issue, and perhaps also to all attempts to come to terms once and for all with as complex a phenomenon as 1989, The historical arguments in the case of a changing (and ultimately disintegrating) Czechoslovakia … [are], of course, only one small piece of an entire spatial and temporal reimagining of Central and Eastern Europe, one that is still in process. Yet, by examining the implications of the rhetorical tensions in democratizing nations during the crumbling of the Cold War, we can perhaps reach a bolder cartography of transition that gets us further out of the binaries that both Cold War and even post–Cold War constructs create.Ultimately, 1989 represents what historians Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney (2004) refer to as a “transnational moment of change,” alongside 1848 or 1968. Such moments foreground the “question of commonality” and, one may add, difference, which, for Horn and Kenney, become “central, a window into the processes of history” (ix).5 In terms of the complex relationships between rhetoric and history, which belong to the central problematic of rhetorical studies, such moments are thus momentous from a rhetorical, not just historical, standpoint.Rhetorically, explorations of such windows provide an opportunity for comparative studies—not, however, in the vein of comparative rhetoric (which has a specific meaning in rhetorical studies) but in the vein of what one may perhaps conceive of as comparative rhetorical histories, somewhat loosely analogous to what Horn and Kenney (2004) advocate as “comparative history.” In terms of such histories, the transnational moment of 1989 appears to consist largely, and paradoxically, of returns to, or perhaps reinventions of, national histories. Horn and Kenney (2004) note, “[I]t is in the modern era that one begins to observe moments in which social, political, and cultural movements, and even entire societies, even as they are bound within a narrative of the nation-state, consciously or unconsciously embrace similar experiences or express similar aspirations across distinctly national frontiers” (x).In the cases of all such modern transnational/national moments, as Horn and Kenney (2004) point out, the underlying processes of change predated the particular date associated with the change and continued after it—sometimes long after it. In fact, in the cases of most of the Central/Eastern European transformations associated with the year 1989, the processes continue to shape internal politics and to reverberate through the cultures, signaling perhaps not the Fukuyamasque (1992) “end of history” but rather its continuation “by other means.” For the denizens of such countries as Poland, the year 1989 marked not the “end of history” but the end of the utopia of an ideal state based on enforced monocentric unity that could transform human relations and human nature itself—a utopia that began, in Western political imagination, with Plato’s Republic. Ornatowski’s article examines the dialectics of the dissolution of such a utopian vision in the case of Poland. This dissolution, Ornatowski suggests, marked in effect a revolutionary return from utopia back to history in an ironic reversal of the dialectical process followed by Plato in his Republic.The articles in this issue, beginning with Salazar’s whimsical musings on the tradition and meanings of dating itself, thus in various ways and from various perspectives interrogate the received narratives of 1989 from the distance of the twenty-five years that separate us from these historic events. While many of the authors note the centrality of the ubiquitous theme of return in 1989 and post-1989 discourses (return to Europe, return of/to politics, return of the people, and so on), they note that such returns also mark new beginnings that present alternatives and/or transformative possibilities in different historical contexts, such as former Yugoslavia, Soviet/Post-Soviet nations, or the “new Europe.”Twenty-five years later, 1989 continues to remain a thriving locus of rhetorical inquiry, as debates over “post-Communism” (the situation after Communism) and/or “postcommunism” (the sociopolitical situation characterized by the persistent presence of the past) continue to define transitional dimensions of political life and remain an open field of political persuasion. Attempting to reconstruct the relationship between history and rhetoric during and after 1989 as a referential anchor for transitional studies, this issue addresses both past and present, the historical moment of 1989, and the broader pre- and post-1989 historical contexts as a temporal framework within which political and rhetorical dynamics of transition can be examined. How these dynamics continue to play out on the local and global scenes still remains to be seen and depends very much on the evolving and contested perceptions and interpretations of the meanings of 1989.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2015.1010860
  4. Help is in the Helping: An Evaluation of Help Documentation in a Networked Age
    Abstract

    AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2015.1001298
  5. “A Maturity of Thought Very Rare in Young Girls”: Women’s Public Engagement in Nineteenth-Century High School Commencement Essays
    Abstract

    Though largely debarred from public rhetorical performance as adult women, young women in the nineteenth-century US received rhetorical training and performed their original compositions before large public audiences as high school students. Their access to the academic platform stemmed in part from their politically contained position as students and “girls” in this context. But students used these opportunities to intervene in political debates and to comment on their experiences as women and students. These rhetorical interventions represent an important part of our rhetorical history, shedding light on a significant rhetorical opportunity for many young women across the US.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.1008911
  6. From the Book &amp; New Media Review Editor’s Desk
    doi:10.25148/clj.9.2.009289
  7. Front Matter
    doi:10.25148/clj.9.2.009284
  8. Contributors
    doi:10.1215/15314200-3130627
  9. Introduction
    Abstract

    Introduction| April 01 2015 Introduction: Encounter Tradition, Make It New: Essays on New Approaches for Teaching the Harlem Renaissance Fran L. Lassiter Fran L. Lassiter Guest Editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2015) 15 (2): 353–358. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845081 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Fran L. Lassiter; Introduction: Encounter Tradition, Make It New: Essays on New Approaches for Teaching the Harlem Renaissance. Pedagogy 1 April 2015; 15 (2): 353–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845081 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2845081
  10. From the Editor’s Desk
    doi:10.1177/0047281615570031

March 2015

  1. Special Editors' Introduction to Issue 3.1
    Abstract

    There's a saying, sometimes attributed as a French Proverb: "If you don't do politics, politics does you. " This seems a straightforward enough idea. Yet as a field, we seem hesitant to acknowledge our necessary and unavoidable role within political structures. Perhaps out of a sense of professionalism, we place a veneer of neutrality around our classrooms and scholarship that constrains our potential as rhetoricians, public writers, and educators. At such moments, we are reminded of Paulo Freire's "Letter to a North American Teacher": "The idea of an identical and neutral role for all teachers could only be accepted by someone who was either naive or very clever. Such a person might affirm the neutrality of education, thinking of school as merely a kind of parenthesis whose essential structure was immune to the influences of social class, of gender, or race" (211). That is, claims of neutrality are either naive of political conditions or a clever way of preserving an unjust status quo. Breaking free of this thinking allows us to ask what our teaching supports and challenges, what our scholarship maintains and combats. With these questions in mind and a recognition of the need to decide and to act, we developed this special issue.

    doi:10.21623/1.3.1.1
  2. The Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric: Commentaries on Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, tr. by Ronald F. Hock
    Abstract

    Reviews 217 signposting and recapitulating his argument as it unfolds. In this and other ways he mirrors the qualities he values in Hume's own writing. Christopher Reid University ofLondon Hock, Ronald F., trans., The Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric: Commentaries on Aphthonins's Progymnasmata, (Society of Biblical Literature, Writ­ ings from the Greco-Roman World 31), Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. xii + 345 pp. ISBN 978-1-58983-644-0 This is the third and last volume of a trilogv, all three volumes of which present ancient and Byzantine texts and facing translations, equipped with extensive introductions and commentary, on the chrein, the third of the canon­ ical fourteen progymnasmata, the compositional exercises that began at the intermediate level of the Roman imperial literary-rhetorical education and extended into the advanced level. All three volumes have been published by the Society of Biblical Literature. The first two were co-authored by the late Edward N. O'Neil. O'Neill's scholarly partner Ronald F. Hock has brought the project to its conclusion and benefited from materials pertinent to the third volume that O'Neil left behind. The first volume (1986) presented mainly Roman imperial Greek and Latin discussions of the chreia from an­ cient theoretical works. The second volume (2002) offered ancient and Byzan­ tine classroom exercises in which chreiai were read, copied, declined, and, when the student was ready, elaborated. And now in this final volume Hock gives us the sections of six Byzantine texts that comment on the discussion of the chreia in the Progymnasmata of the late ancient rhetorical theorist Aphthonius , whose work, admitted to the so-called Hermogenic Corpus, became the authority par excellence on these compositional exercises. Hock's Byzantine commentaries on Aphthonius, intended for teachers or students, are by John of Sardis (ninth century), the so-called P-Scholia (ca. 1000), John Doxapatres (eleventh century), the Rhetorica Marciana (twelfth century), Maximus Planudes (thirteenth century), and Matthew Camariotes (fifteenth century). These commentators on Aphthonius, like Aphthonius himself, discussed all fourteen progymnasmata. Hock has excerpted from them only the sections on the chreia. Aphthonius's discussion of the chreia—a saying, an action, or a com­ bination of action and saying, ascribed to a person of note—is only a few pages long. It begins with some brief theoretical remarks. Aphthonius gives a definition and an etymology of the term. He explains the three kinds of chreia. And he lists the eight headings to be used for elaborating a chreia. But the greater part of his discussion is dedicated to the presentation of an elabo­ ration of the chreia "Isocrates said that the root of education is bitter, but the fruits are sweet." Aphthonius's short discussion of the chreia (as well as the 218 RHETORICA rest of his Progymnasmata) generated pages and pages of sequential Byzan­ tine commentaries. One thinks of the similar fate of better known canonized texts: Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen. It is something of a déjà lu experience to read commentator after commentator on Aphthonius s spare treatment; indeed, Hock's introductions to each of the commentators, too, inevitably have some repetitiveness to them. Still, one does find peculiarities and idiosyncrasies in the various Byzantine texts, even "some independent analysis" (p. 28). Yet to expect to find much originality in this kind of material is to set oneself up for disappointment; to complain about its pedantry and triviality is to expect a pre-modern scholastic tradition not to be itself (cf. pp. 3, 6). Hock does well in his introductions to keep an eye on the whole work from which the particular chreia section is being excerpted, although his full discussion of Maximus Planudes on the progymnasma speaking-incharacter (pp. 285-92) in his introduction to Planudes on the chreia was perhaps unnecessary there. The commentators clarify, supplement, and illustrate Aphthonius. They have a "penchant... to build on one another" (p. 134). (Matthew Camariotes, though, is in a skimpy class of his own, briefer on the chreia even than Aphthonius.) They bring in material both from the ancient progymnasmatic theoreticians ps.-Hermogenes, Nicolaus of Myra, and Theon (a large portion of the P-Scholia, for example, is simply...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2015.0028
  3. Letter from the Editor
    doi:10.1016/s8755-4615(15)00020-1
  4. Information for Authors
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201526937
  5. Call for Papers for 2015 TYCA Regional Conferences
    doi:10.58680/tetyc201526950
  6. From the Editor
    Abstract

    Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/4/collegeenglish26919-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce201529157
  7. Announcements and Calls for Papers
    doi:10.58680/ce201526925

February 2015

  1. Contexts of Lived Realities in SB 1070 Arizona: A Response to Asenas and Johnson’s “Economic Globalization and the ‘Given Situation’”
    Abstract

    &#8220;We advocate for a needed awareness on the criminalizing of brown and black bodies within the borderlands.&#8221;

  2. Addresses of Contributors to This Issue
    Abstract

    Other| February 01 2015 Addresses of Contributors to This Issue Rhetorica (2015) 33 (1): 108–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2015.33.1.108 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Addresses of Contributors to This Issue. Rhetorica 1 February 2015; 33 (1): 108–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2015.33.1.108 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. © 2015 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2015.33.1.108
  3. Front Matter
    doi:10.1525/rh.2015.33.1.fm
  4. Back Matter
    doi:10.1525/rh.2015.33.1.bm
  5. Using Translation to Drive Conceptual Development for Students Becoming Literate in English as an Additional Language
    Abstract

    Literacy research has not yet revealed how bilingual learners develop coherent and robust theories of language. Translation, however, provides emergent bilinguals (EL students) with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness, which can lead to a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about language and literacy. This preliminary research study sought to formulate an instructional approach (TRANSLATE: Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners) focused on using translation to ultimately improve ELL students’ reading comprehension. Using design research methods and qualitative analytical techniques, researchers asked middle school students described as struggling readers to work collaboratively and use various strategies to translate key excerpts from their required English literature curriculum into Spanish. Analysis of students’ statements, decision making, and interaction indicated that students’ conceptual understandings about language played an important role in their learning. Students reflected on the nature of vocabulary, syntax, and the ways that different languages communicate ideas. These findings extend conversations in literacy studies concerning the unique affordances of bilingualism to increase metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, known contributors to higher levels of reading comprehension.

    doi:10.58680/rte201526869
  6. Symposium: Critical Retrospections on the 1987 CCCC Position Statement “Scholarship in Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Department Chairs”
    Abstract

    This issue’s symposium consists of what I call “critical retrospections” on a CCCC position statement from 1987, “Scholarship in Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Department Chairs.” The authors of the statement intended it to be useful to faculty and administrators called upon to justify or explain the work of composition studies as an academic and scholarly field. The statement calls attention to our field’s methodological “diversity” as well as to how our work “reach[es] outside the traditional methods of literary studies.” I invited several scholars and teachers from across the field to reflect on this statement, asking them if it still represents the range of interests and commitments within our discipline.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201526863
  7. CCCC News
    doi:10.58680/ccc201526864
  8. Announcements and Calls
    doi:10.58680/ccc201526865
  9. From the Editor
    Abstract

    Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/66/3/collegecompositionandcommunication26857-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc201526857
  10. British Invasion: James Britton, Composition Studies, and Anti-Disciplinarity
    Abstract

    This essay examines James Britton’s role in the development of composition studies as an academic discipline and considers the relevance of his work in the field today. It contends that his influence arose, paradoxically, through his construction of an antidisciplinary theory of the role of language in teaching and learning. Finally, in response to calls for composition studies to move away from its longstanding focus on instruction, it argues instead for an increased emphasis on pedagogical inquiry.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201526858

January 2015

  1. Porn architecture
    Abstract

    This poster brief describes ongoing research on user taxonomies in free internet pornography, examining tagging and filtering systems in two digital porn bulletin boards on the social network Reddit. These two communities.r/PornVids, a board for mainstream porn, and r/ChickFlixxx, a board for woman-friendly or feminist porn. offer unique insight into not only porn consumption patterns, but also ways of sorting pornography according to distinctly gendered preferences. The researcher concludes by describing future directions for empirical inquiry into internet pornography, making a case for the importance of affective considerations in user research and interface design.

    doi:10.1145/2721882.2721885
  2. Getting to “How Do You Know?” Rather Than “So What?” From “What's New?”
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavida CharneyDavida Charney is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her latest project is a book, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First Person Psalms, to be published by Sheffield Press.NotesSummer Smith Taylor's research career was too brief, cut short by her death from illness at age 39 in 2011.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2015.975965
  3. Embodying and Disabling Antiwar Activism: Disrupting YouTube’s “Mother’s Day for Peace”
    Abstract

    AbstractYouTube allows activists to broadcast their missions and engage global audiences. “Mother’s Day for Peace,” a 2007 video, features American actresses who recite Julia Ward Howe’s radical 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation and describe their personal thoughts on mothering. Analyzing this video with transnational rhetoric and disability rhetoric frameworks not only illuminates the persuasive possibilities and drawbacks for the video’s normative feminine gender performance and the spectacle of a war-injured Iraqi girl but also models an approach that prompts rhetoricians to examine larger rhetorical concerns revealed by the intersections of disability, race, gender, and globalization. Notes1 I am greatly indebted to RR peer reviewers Anne Demo, who helped me sharpen my focus, and Jay Dolmage, who both illuminated the broader implications of my analysis and introduced me to Meekosha’s invaluable work. Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson, Maggie LaWare, and Jason Palmeri also provided feedback that benefited my analysis during earlier stages of this project.2 Led by President Robert Greenwald, BNF produces film projects with activist causes, addressing such issues as improving US worker safety, ending petroleum drilling, revealing the power of billionaire Koch brothers, and uncovering US military spending. Greenwald has directed and produced numerous short films with his company Brave New Films, including exposés of Fox News, Walmart, and more. BNF’s activist videos clearly showcase their intention to inspire and create change toward progressive causes.3 For the description I draw on here, see http://archive.is/0RFII. For NMV’s updated website, see http://www.nomorevictims.org/newsite/about/.4 According to holiday historian Jones, Mother’s Day has facilitated a variety of political and social action. For example, in 1933 President Roosevelt issued a proclamation on Mother’s Day that called attention to mothers and children living in poverty (216), and in 1968 Coretta Scott King led a Mother’s Day march to support poor children and their mothers (217). Regarding peace-related political action, a “Mother’s Peace Day” parade was held in 1938, and decades later in the 1980s, Helen Caldicott founded the Women’s Party for Survival, organized against nuclear arms and proliferation. The Party led demonstrations on Mother’s Day. Most recently, on May 2, 2012, supermodel Christy Turlington’s organization, Every Mother Counts, which focuses on maternal mortality, uploaded the video, “No Mothers Day,” prompting mothers to be silent and “disappear” on Mother’s Day in order to “help raise awareness about the hundreds of thousands of women who die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth” (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0w669fZBH8).5 Established in 2002, CodePink (http://www.codepink4peace.org/) identifies itself as a grassroots peace and social justice organization. While not exclusively, its approaches and strategies are women-initiated, women-led, and often based on traditionally feminine tropes such as the color pink.6 Attending to the massive influence of Mother’s Day as a major cultural event in the US is beyond the confines of this article, but I encourage readers to look out for activist events that coincide with the holiday.7 This photograph can be viewed online: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005018835/.8 Widely available online, the full document can be read at CodePink’s website: http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=217.9 As of this writing, the site includes broken links and brief information on 2010’s International Women’s Day, another example of a lack of using YouTube’s ability to maintain a presence and further the ongoing discourse regarding Mother’s Day’s potential for antiwar activism.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAbby M. DubisarAbby M. Dubisar is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty member in women’s and gender studies at Iowa State University, where she teaches classes on women’s/feminist rhetoric, gender and communication, and popular culture analysis. Her research analyzes the rhetorical strategies of women peace activists in a wide variety of contexts, from archival holdings to YouTube.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.976305
  4. <i>Kairos</i>and Quantification: Data, Interpretation, and the Problem of<i>Crania Americana</i>
    Abstract

    AbstractThis essay examines kairos and rhetorical situation theory in relation to scientific inquiry, particularly the quantitative and interpretive components of Samuel G. Morton’s Crania Americana. Morton’s text is a flashpoint of debate on the ability of the sciences to detach themselves from their social contexts. This essay seeks to elucidate the significant political and social influences on scientific practice by examining the impact of kairos on Morton’s data analysis, and thereby to demonstrate kairos as a model for analyzing the interplay of the subjective and objective elements in processes of scientific inquiry. Notes1 I thank RR reviewers Daniel Schowalter and James Zappen for their insightful and useful guidance. I am also grateful for the tremendous helpfulness of Theresa Enos and her staff.2 See http://plum.museum.upenn.edu/˜orsa/Welcome.html.3 See studies by Lyne and Howe and by Barahona and Cachon on the rhetorical dynamics of Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibria.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDaniel ColeDaniel Cole is an assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies and Composition at Hofstra University. His research explores Native American rhetoric and resistance writing, especially during the era of Indian Removal. He also researches theory and practice in writing instruction.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.976148
  5. Mediated Mourning: Troubled Identifications in Atom Egoyan’s<i>Ararat</i>
    Abstract

    AbstractAtom Egoyan's film Ararat advances a rhetoric of mediated mourning that counters Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. His characters' mourning is mediated in two senses: First, it expresses itself through the production or analy‐sis of visual texts; second, those texts interpose themselves between grieving subjects and the community with whom they identify. while Ararat attempts to visualize the unquenchable urge toward consubstantiality with an ancestral collective, the movie deliberately resists absorption by discourses that render Armenian post-exiles answerable to skeptics and to privileged audiences who appropriate narratives of atrocity for personal catharsis. Notes1. 1I dedicate this essay to my father, Phillip Dwayne Carter (1952–2014). I would also like to thank RR reviewers David Blakesley and Nathaniel Rivers for their trenchant commentary, and Theresa Jarnagin Enos for her guidance and support.2. 2See Siraganian (134) and Parker (1047). What Parker sees as Egoyan's insistence on "intergenerational embrace" also enters into Saroyan's film, which dramatizes young people struggling to support suffering parents as well as parents reaching helplessly toward lost children.3. 3Davis features the quoted passage from Burke's Language as Symbolic Action in her own Inessential Solidarity (33).4. 4See Romney (171) and Torchin (9) for discussions of Spielberg's translation of Holocaust testimony into epic spectacle.5. 5Theriault describes the circumstances of Gorky's emigration in Rethinking Arshile Gorky (15). She also observes that Gorky's ensuing work tended toward abstract experimentalism, as he experienced what Georgiana Banita describes as "an ambivalent relationship to figurative painting" (93). His simultaneous practice and suspicion of figurative representation make him an especially apt ally for Egoyan, who expresses a similar attitude toward mimetic film.6. 6See Inessential Solidarity 21. Although Davis elegantly describes Burke's grounding of identity in multiple, sometimes clashing affinities, she challenges his idea of a biological individual that precedes discourse and that engages in persuasion so as to overcome its originary division from other subjects (23–25). She posits intersubjective union as a constitutive condition rather than a frustrated aspiration.7. 7The Blanchot quotation appears in The Historiographic Perversion (10). In an intriguing turn in the same work, Nichanian also refuses to describe events in Armenia as genocide. He does so, however, from a position deeply opposed to the one adopted by Ali. Nichanian details how historians have demanded copious archival testimony to support the claim of genocide, yet argues that such testimony could never encompass the horror of what took place in Van during and after 1915. Insofar as the idea of genocide makes an intellectual commodity of unrepresentable violence, he finds it inadequate to a Catastrophe that has not ended but continues in the form of concerted denial by the government whose predecessors brought it about.Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher CarterChristopher Carter is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as Composition Director. He is author of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton Press, 2008) and previous editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His essays have appeared in Works and Days, JAC, and College English, and he has written chapters for Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers as well as Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge. His second book, Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in U. S. Social Documentary Photography, will be published by the University of Alabama Press in 2015.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.976156
  6. In this issue
    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2014.11.002
  7. Front Matter
    doi:10.25148/clj.10.1.009270
  8. From the Book &amp; New Media Review Editor’s Desk
    doi:10.25148/clj.10.1.009278
  9. Abandon All Hope
    Abstract

    This commentary is an afterword and response to a cluster of essays on graduate education edited by Leonard Cassuto. Arguing for reform of the academic job system in which most PhDs will become contingent faculty members, the commentary engages principally with the work of David Downing and Marc Bousquet.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2799100
  10. Condemned to Repeat
    Abstract

    This response to the articles collected in this cluster observes that many analysts have constructed a “survivor” discourse surrounding graduate education, offering solutions at the level of individual choice and agency. The author argues instead for the critical importance of addressing academic employment structurally.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2799292
  11. Contributors
    doi:10.1215/15314200-2799848