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December 2009

  1. The Rhetoric of Intertextuality
    Abstract

    In this essay I discuss and exemplify a wide range of nontraditional concepts and texts as they relate to the rhetoric of intertextuality. As a result of this inquiry, I hope to give teachers of writing and their students new strategies for understanding and producing discourse. More specifically, I hope to give readers new ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, invention, genre, arrangement, and audience.

    doi:10.1080/07350190903415172
  2. Alternate Readings: Student Hermeneutics and Academic Discourse
    Abstract

    The attentions given to textual production in composition scholarship have led to a neglect of the dynamics of textual reception. Renewed acquaintance with the discipline of hermeneutics will provide scholars and instructors with a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between interpretive processes and rhetorical strategies. Building on the work of Phelps, Mailloux, and Crusius, this article revisits Gadamer and Ricoeur, two of the more prominent scholars of modern hermeneutics, for the purpose of applying their principles to learning objectives and class assignments in college-level writing courses.

    doi:10.1080/07350190903415198
  3. Writing Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing
    Abstract

    In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099487
  4. “You Fail”: Plagiarism, the Ownership of Writing, and Transnational Conflicts
    Abstract

    Responding to cultural concerns about the ownership of writing and the nature of plagiarism, this article examines discourses about plagiarism by ESL students and argues for a plurality of approaches to understanding the ownership of language and textual appropriation. First, it uses speech act theory to explain the dynamics of plagiarism; second, it examines transnational political contexts for writing pedagogy; and third, it offers a Daoist understanding of language.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099486
  5. “Internationalization” and Composition Studies: Reorienting the Discourse
    Abstract

    While internationalization has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different in their approaches or rhetorics, appear to lack what we have; and how we might avoid colonialist intervention or offer consultation. These import/export focal points create key blind spots in our awareness of deep and rich writing research and programming traditions internationally, of how we fit—or do not fit—into this broader world, and of missed opportunities for self-reflection and growth.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099470
  6. Site-Specific: Virtual Refinishing in Contemporary Rhetorical Practice
    Abstract

    Visual rhetoric fuels composition as rhetors refinish filmed moments to show others what they “see” in them. My work examines projects that model strategic discourse in public spaces. It offers ideas for achieving full and guarded disclosure when clarity is but one of several communicative goals.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099473
  7. “Writing in Electronic Environments”: A Concept and a Course for the Writing and Rhetoric Major
    Abstract

    In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20099491

November 2009

  1. Sharing the Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar: The Effects of Making Disciplinary Conventions Explicit in Undergraduate Writing about Literature Courses
    Abstract

    The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special topoi of literary analysis”conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates are customarily tacitly imparted to literature students. We compare student writing and questionnaires from seven sections of Writing about Literature providing explicit instruction in these disciplinary conventions to those from nine sections taught using traditional methods. We examine whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions helps students produce rhetorically effective discourse, whether English professors prefer student discourse that uses these conventions, and whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions hampers student expression, enjoyment, and engagement. Five English professors who rated the student essays gave higher ratings to essays that engaged the special topoi of their discipline. Furthermore, they significantly preferred the essays written by students who had received explicit instruction in these topoi. Meanwhile, students who received explicit instruction in the special topoi of literary analysis indicated comparable, often higher levels, of engagement, enjoyment, and perceived opportunities for self-expression to those students who experienced the course’s traditional pedagogy. These findings suggest several implications for WID instruction and research relating to student and faculty professionalization in higher education.

    doi:10.58680/rte20099183

October 2009

  1. Dancing Attitudes in Wartime: Kenneth Burke and General Semantics
    Abstract

    Abstract The 1930s in America abounded with debates about language and communication. Interest in the effects of propaganda and the problems of miscommunication prompted the development of organizations like the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937) and Count Alfred Korzybski's Institute of General Semantics (1938). Albeit in different ways, each of these groups aimed to increase the public's awareness of the effects of language and to improve its ability to communicate. But the assumptions about language and communication held by these organizations would ultimately render them short-lived in terms of public and scholarly attention. This article examines the work of these organizations in relation to that of Kenneth Burke, and demonstrates how Burke developed his rhetorically oriented theories of communication against and in response to this rich background. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jack Selzer for his encouragement and advice on earlier drafts of this article (as well as for inspiration, as in its original version this was written for his Kenneth Burke graduate seminar at Penn State). Thanks also to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes 1For more thorough elaborations and further discussions, see, for example, Crowley; Sproule; George and Selzer. 2See, for instance, “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The Journal of Philosophy 31 (February 1, 1934): 80–81; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” International Journal of Ethics 44 (April 1934): 377–384; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” The New Republic 79 (August 1, 1934): 327; “Review of Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski,” Supplement to Nature (October 20, 1934): 617. 3Korzybski has a curious predilection for not capitalizing names of systems (the aristotelian, newtonian, and euclidian being the most commonly used). Because most adherents to General Semantics use the same convention, I will follow it as well in this article. 4Of course, “orientation” is also a key word for Burke, especially in Permanence and Change. Burke's idea of “orientation” appears to have come directly from Korzybski: “Orientation can go wrong. Consider, for instance, what conquest over the environment we have attained through our powers of abstraction, of generalization; and then consider the stupid national or racial wars which have been fought precisely because these abstractions were mistaken for realities” (6). Burke's term, via Veblen, for problematic orientations is “trained incapacities,” or, as he defines it more completely, “a faulty selection of means due to a faulty theory of causal relationships” (9), as, for example, chickens who have been trained to eat when a bell rings will still come running when the bell signals punishment instead of food. 5In an unpublished manuscript (recently discovered, edited, and published by James Zappen), Burke notes that Korzybski's structural differential “is valuable for calling attention to an important abstractive process of language, but cannot of itself replace a mature linguistic analysis.” 6Also, while the IPA definitely experienced failure as an organization (although certainly, as I pointed out earlier, communication departments and composition programs still find value in the seven propaganda devices), it should be noted here that contrary to Condit's assertion that “I fear that general semantics has all but died out without surviving heir” (“Post-Burke” 350), in fact the Institute of General Semantics is still quite active, and has been varyingly influential in the fields of cognitive psychology, popular psychology, linguistics, and education. Inarguably, though, it has lost most of its credibility (and even name recognition) with scholars in the fields of rhetoric and composition and communication. 7In the same letter, Burke explains to Josephson that he was going to attend one of Korzybski's General Semantics seminars in Chicago upon the offer of the “Semanticists” to pay his expenses, but decided against it because it would have consumed nearly two weeks. He writes, “Hated to pass it up—for these are the days when one yearns for his band of the like-minded—and Hayakawa writes me: ‘Both the students of General Semantics of my acquaintance and the students of linguistics are enthusiastic about your work.' Hayakawa teaches at a school in Chicago that recently offered me a job, though alas! at no such handsome salary as I could easily imagine” (Burke to Josephson 17 Dec. Citation1941). In a letter of several years earlier, Burke had complained to Richard McKeon about Stuart Chase's Tyranny of Words (which he was then writing the review for); he quips, “how he does tyrannize with words!” Burke goes on to write, “Rule of thumb: Anyone who takes Korzybski's ‘Science and Sanity’ for anything more than half a book on the subject of semantics is a public calamity. Taken as half a book, it is excellent. Taken as a whole book, it is far worse than no book at all, far inferior to naïve words uttered at random” (Burke to McKeon 13 Dec. 1937). Perhaps reviewing Chase's book (which presented a fairly skewed view of Korzybski's ideas) helped to highlight for Burke the problems with General Semantics. Both of these statements taken together, though, indicate fairly clearly that Burke saw himself not so much rejecting General Semantics, perhaps, as negotiating with it. 8Although he focuses explicitly on the “semanticists” here, Burke is also implicitly responding to the New Critics, a fact suggested by the initial appearance of the essay in The Southern Review, a journal colonized at the time by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate. Burke's double purpose can be ascertained in small jabs elsewhere in The Philosophy of Literary Form; for instance, he remarks, “It is ‘poetic’ to develop method; it is ‘scientific’ to develop methodology. (From this standpoint, the ideal of literary criticism is a ‘scientific’ ideal.)” (130). As Ann George and Jack Selzer point out, “That distinction between scientific and poetic language, based on the Agrarian distrust of science and on the positivist assumption that science and poetry lead to two different and complementary approaches to knowledge and derived at least in part from I.A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), was fast becoming a central tenet of the nascent New Criticism, as the movement would officially be dubbed by Ransom in his 1941 book of that name” (Kenneth Burke 193). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJodie Nicotra Jodie Nicotra is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Idaho, P.O. Box 441102, Moscow, ID 83844-1102, USA.

    doi:10.1080/02773940903092045
  2. Neighborliness at the Co-op: Community and Biospheric Literacy
    Abstract

    In this ethnographic study of an organic foods cooperative, I examine community through three different facets—the Voluntary Association, the Lifestyle Enclave, and the Neighborhood. I use fieldnote examples to show how each of these community facets corresponds with the three visions of discourse for social change considered by Wayne Campbell Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. Peck et al.’s most powerful discouse, community literacy, corresponds to the Neighborhood facet of community. The neighborhood holds promise for developing a Biospheric Literacy as developed by Anne Mareck in the introduction to this special issue. The kinds of meanings that she says acknowledge biospherically interdependent human and non-human community members are, I suggest, ritually enacted through neighborly communication. Further, it is through the cordial talk of neighbors that we communicate the kinds of understandings needed to affect positive social change and limit damage to our biosphere.

    doi:10.25148/clj.4.1.009452
  3. The Co-construction of a Local Public Environmental Discourse: Letters to the Editor, Bermuda's Royal Gazette, and the Southlands Hotel Development Controversy
    Abstract

    As a distinct geographically situated production of public record of daily events that is often imbued with the ideals of the community it serves, the daily newspaper, and the editorial pages in particular, holds a powerful space in the collective mind as a forum and litmus for community opinion. This essay provides a case analysis of community opinion on sustainability and sustainable development in the small island nation of Bermuda through letters to the editor in the country’s daily newspaper, The Royal Gazette. These letters, published in that powerful space through invested and dynamic local media literacy sponsorship, illustrate the potential for effective discourse on environmental sustainability that, at least in Bermuda, constitutes productive community activism in its own right and also fosters additional literate social action.

    doi:10.25148/clj.4.1.009451
  4. Bloom and His Detractors
    Abstract

    Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind elicited a storm of critical discourse regarding the condition of higher education in the United States. This essay performs a retrospective evaluation of the rhetorical modes that animated that body of discourse, suggesting that the polemical responses offered by Bloom's detractors validate his claims about the contradictory ways that openness, tolerance, and diversity are pursued in the university. Revisiting this controversy provides an opportunity for considering the ethics of the academic polemic.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2009-007
  5. Teaching Marx, Dickens, and Yunus to Business Students
    Abstract

    This essay explores strategies for teaching texts that are critical of an untempered pursuit of wealth to business students, although many of these students have chosen their course of study based on their internalization and privileging of capitalist discourse. Karl Marx's “Estranged Labour,” Charles Dickens's Hard Times, and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by Muhammad Yunus can be used in the classroom to encourage students to broaden their understanding of wealth, power, and class and to suggest that they, in their professional lives, may be agents of social change. Pedagogical strategies employed in this first-year course include giving students responsibility for the direction of class discussions, so that their specific interests and agendas receive attention, and requiring that students personalize these texts that may seem distant to them by exploring their own experiences in the world of work and commerce in the context of the readings. By the end of the semester, the binary structure of their worldview has been challenged and, ideally, complicated.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2009-013
  6. Coherence in Workplace Instant Messages
    Abstract

    In our case study, we examined the instant messaging (IM) workplace discourse of a pair of expert IM users. We found that the participants maintained discourse cohesion and thus coherence via short, rapidly sent transmissions that created uninterrupted transmission sequences. Such uninterrupted transmission sequences allowed each participant to maintain the floor. Also, the participants used topicalizations and performative verbs to maintain coherence. We also found that the participants' use of short transmissions may have ambiguated their enactment of their institutional roles and the rights afforded to them by those roles.

    doi:10.2190/tw.39.4.e

September 2009

  1. Dominante spaziale e struttura argomentativa nel V Discorso Sacro di Elio Aristide
    Abstract

    Aristides’ own definition of the Sacred Tales as diegesis allows us to read them using narratological categories. The work contains circular or, better, spiral-like time structures. The Fifth discourse is dominated by spatial circularity, coexisting with a paradoxical indifference for the real space itself while Aristides’ attention focuses on the oneiric one. It has an argumentative structure based on illustration and accumulation; the altered spatio-temporal axis shows that Asclepius’ intervention crosses the boundaries between time and space, dream and reality. The Sacred Tales owe their simple stylistic structure, strikingly different from other discourses of Aristides, to many factors, including their psychic and religious content.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0001
  2. Campus Racial Politics and a “Rhetoric of Injury”
    Abstract

    If college writing faculty wish to prepare students to engage in civic forums, then how might we prepare students to write and speak amid racial politics on our campuses? This article explores the college student discourse that shaped an interracial conflict at a public California university in 2002 and questions the “rhetoric of injury” informing racial accountability in the post-civil rights era.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098328
  3. Theorizing Feminist Pragmatic Rhetoric as a Communicative Art for the Composition Practicum
    Abstract

    This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a communicative art of writing program change.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20098323

August 2009

  1. Can Perelman’s NR be Viewed as an Ethics of Discourse?
    doi:10.1007/s10503-009-9149-8
  2. Manoeuvring Strategically with Praeteritio
    Abstract

    This paper investigates the role that the stylistic device of praeteritio (or paralipsis) can play in arguers’ attempts to reconcile their rhetorical with their dialectical aims by manoeuvring strategically when carrying out particular discussion moves of the dialectical procedure for resolving a dispute. First, attention will be paid to the ways in which praeteritio can be realized in discourse. Next, an analysis is given of the effects the use of praeteritio may have as a result of the presentational means that are employed. This analysis will be used to establish the possibilities for strategic manoeuvring with this device in the different stages of an argumentative discussion. Finally, an indication is given of how the types of strategic manoeuvring that a praeteritio can be instrumental in may derail, and in which violations of the rules for critical discussion such derailed manoeuvrings may result.

    doi:10.1007/s10503-009-9153-z
  3. The New Rhetoric’s Inheritance. Argumentation and Discourse Analysis
    doi:10.1007/s10503-009-9154-y
  4. Standpoints: Researching and Teaching English in the Digital Dimension
    Abstract

    David E. Kirkland argues that our understanding of literate practice in relation to space needs to be radically reworked to account for new digital dimensions that are dispersed, discontinuous, and yet deeply woven into everyday and institutional worlds. His account highlights the way these digital spaces pepper the official landscape of schooling, fracturing the dominance of official discourse as students’ diverse linguistic, literate, and semiotic practices infuse this complex composite space.

    doi:10.58680/rte20097243
  5. Ventriloquation in Discussions of Student Writing: Examples from a High School English Class
    Abstract

    This study examines discussions of model papers in a high school Advanced Placement English classroom where students were preparing for a high-stakes writing assessment. Much of the current research on talk about writing in various contexts such as classroom discourse, teacher-student writing conferences, and peer tutoring has emphasized the social and constructive nature of instructional discourse. Building on this work, the present study explored how talk about writing also takes on a performative function, as speakers accent or point to the features of the context that are most significant ideologically. Informed by perspectives on the emergent and mediated nature of discourse, this study found that the participants used ventriloquation to voice the aspects of the essays that they considered to be most important, and that these significant chunks were often aphorisms about the test essay. The teacher frequently ventriloquated raters, while the students often ventriloquated themselves or the teacher. The significance of ventriloquation is not just that it helps to mediate the generic conventions of timed student essays; it also mediates social positioning by helping the speakers to present themselves and others in flexible ways. This study also raises questions about the ways that ventriloquation can limit the ways that students view academic writing.

    doi:10.58680/rte20097245

July 2009

  1. Into the Field: The Use of Student-Authored Ethnography in Service-Learning Settings
    Abstract

    This essay explores student-authored ethnographies written by undergraduates in four sections of a service-learning course taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. I argue that the introductory sections of students’ ethnographic narratives provide particular insights into the relationship between the service experience, ethnographic inscription, and student subjectivities. Following a discourse analysis of student writing, I offer some thoughts about how instructors might improve the pedagogical pairing of ethnographic writing with service-learning experiences.

    doi:10.59236/rjv8i3pp52-75
  2. Kairos as God's Time in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Last Sunday Sermon
    Abstract

    The purpose of this article is to advance the discussion of kairos by developing it as a theory of divine timing. While some critics have noted kairos' potential for understanding “God's time,” we lack a grounding of this interpretation in the close analysis of religious texts. This paper does so and asserts that kairos can be understood not only as a hermeneutic for considering temporal constraints, but also as a theory for the production of revelatory discourse and its political implications. Ultimately, the article tries to enrich our comprehension of kairos (a figure we thought we had understood) by examining an unknown text from Martin Luther King Jr. (an orator we thought we had read) as a foray into an area of our discipline that we have neglected to develop: the rhetoric of revelation.

    doi:10.1080/02773940902991411
  3. A Grounded Investigation of Genred Guidelines in Cancer Care Deliberations
    Abstract

    Genred documents facilitate collaboration and workplace practices in many ways—particularly in the medical workplace. This article represents a portion of a larger grounded investigation of how medical professionals invoke a wide range of rhetorical strategies when deliberating about complex patient cases during weekly, multidisciplinary deliberations called Tumor Board meetings. Specifically, the author explores the role of one key document in oncological practice, the Standard of Care document. Each Standard of Care document (one for every known cancer) presents a set of national guidelines intended to standardize the treatment of cancer. Tumor Board participants invoke these guidelines as evidence for or against particular future action. In order to better understand how genred, generalizable guidelines like Standard of Care documents afford decision making amid uncertainty, the author conducts a temporal and contextual analysis of the document's use during deliberations as well as a modified Toulminian analysis of a representative sample. Results suggest that, while on its own the document achieves an authoritative, charter-like purpose, it fails to make explicit a link between individual patients' experiences and the profession's expectations for how to act. Implications for how genred, generalizable guidelines—given the way they encourage certain ways of seeing over others—organize and authorize work are discussed, and a modified Toulminian approach to understanding the relationship between claim and evidence in multimodal texts is modeled.

    doi:10.1177/0741088309336937
  4. Ethical or Unethical Persuasion?: The Rhetoric of Offers to Participate in Clinical Trials
    Abstract

    Based on a sample of 22 oncology encounters, this article presents a discourse analysis of positive, neutral, or negative valence in the presentation of three elements of informed consent—purpose, benefits, and risks—in offers to participate in clinical trials. It is found that physicians regularly present these key elements of consent with a positive valence, perhaps blurring the distinction between clinical care and clinical research in trial offers. The authors argue that the rhetoric of trial offers constructs and reflects the complex relationships of two competing ethical frameworks—contemporary bioethics and professional medical ethics—both aimed at governing the discourse of trial offers. The authors consider the status of ethical or unethical persuasion within each framework, proposing what is called the best-option principle as the ethical principle governing trial offers within professional medical ethics.

    doi:10.1177/0741088309336936
  5. The Corrido: A Border Rhetoric
    Abstract

    The border rhetorics that Latino/a students bring into the classroom can help them and other students resist being appropriated by academic discourse. For example, the corrido involves a mimicry of conventions that enables students to envision a fluid identity rather than exchange one identity for another.

    doi:10.58680/ce20097170

June 2009

  1. John Pym, Ideographs, and the Rhetoric of Opposition to the English Crown
    Abstract

    Historians give John Pym due credit as a successful Parliamentarian; rhetorical critics examine Pym's prowess as an orator. Both perspectives focus on Pym's management of issues of the day and do not account for his masterful appropriation of political language. We conduct an ideographic analysis of twelve of his addresses to Parliament between 1640 and 1643. His discourse reveals a crucial reformulation of <law> in relation to subsidiary ideographs, including <religion>, <justice>, and <Parliamentary privilege>. These ideological innovations were instrumental in building Parliamentary opposition to Charles I and allowed for advances in democratic ideas made manifest in Anglo-American liberalism.

    doi:10.1080/07350190902958677
  2. Information, Architecture, and Hybridity: The Changing Discourse of the Public Library
    Abstract

    In an industrial society, the library is associated with modern economic, political, and social metanarratives. With the rise of digital technology, public libraries are threatened with the possibility of becoming obsolete and irrelevant. Spaces and interfaces intersect with modern and postmodern narratives as the library vies to establish its identity as a legitimizer and purveyor of knowledge in the information age. Through architecture, the library comes to speak the language of hybridity to reassert its relevance and reposition itself.

    doi:10.1080/10572250902947066
  3. Usability Research in the Writing Lab: Sustaining Discourse and Pedagogy
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2008.10.001
  4. Teaching Propriety: Unlocking the Mysteries of “Political Correctness”
    Abstract

    Contemporary composition classrooms have understandably distanced themselves from the elitism associated with the terms taste and propriety. However, writers do need to learn how appropriate discourse is rhetorically negotiated. Understanding and reinventing propriety’s rhetorical function can enable students and teachers to develop notions of propriety that consider complex histories and perspectives.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20097195

May 2009

  1. The Rhetoric of Passion in Donne's Holy Sonnets
    Abstract

    Abstract In his Holy Sonnets, the English Renaissance poet and divine John Donne (1572–1631) gives voice to powerful emotional outbursts. Previous critics have mostly been concerned with the religious context and theological positions of the sonnets. This study rather attempts to isolate the psychological context of the poems by relating them to the early modern discourse on the passions. In order to grasp the pathos of Donne's Holy Sonnets, we need to consider the advice on how to handle violent emotion in such treatises as Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and Edward Reynolds's A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640).

    doi:10.1525/rh.2009.27.2.159
  2. Online Fan Fiction, Global Identities, and Imagination
    Abstract

    Based on longitudinal data from a three-year ethnographic study, this article uses discourse analytic methods to explore the literacy and social practices of three adolescent English language learners writing in an online fan fiction community. Findings suggest that through their participation in online fan-related activities, these three youth are using language and other representational resources to enact cosmopolitan identities, make transnational social connections, and experiment with new genres and formats for composing.

    doi:10.58680/rte20097072

April 2009

  1. Jimmy Swaggart's Secular Confession
    Abstract

    Following the exposure of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's illicit rendezvous with a New Orleans prostitute, the Assemblies of God simultaneously orchestrated a massive attempt to silence those who would discuss the tryst and arranged the most widely publicized confession in American history theretofore. The coincidence of a “silence campaign” with the vast distribution of a public confession invites us to reconsider the nature of the public confession. For what place has a public confession, the discourse of disclosure par excellence, in a silence campaign? This question is best answered, I argue, if we understand public confession not as a stable a-historical form, but as a practice that is informed by multiple, competing traditions. I argue that by situating Swaggart's performance in a philosophically modern and secular tradition of public confession we can understand both its complicity in a silence campaign and, more generally, the political logic of the modern public confession.

    doi:10.1080/02773940902766748
  2. Disrupting Discourse: Introducing Mexicano Immigrant Success Stories
    Abstract

    The goal of this article is to disrupt and challenge the negative discourses often associated with Mexican immigrants by introducing Mexicano concepts of success, including buena gente, buen trabajador, and bien educado. These concepts emerged within a Mexicano immigrant community in California that I have been a part of for more than ten years. In collecting data for this project, I conducted a qualitative study, using ethnographic methods, over a two-year period. This article focuses on two individuals: Luis and Armando.

    doi:10.59236/rjv8i2pp171-196
  3. Training Within Industry as Short-Sighted Community Literacyappropriate Training Program: A Case Study of Worker- Centered Training and Its Implications
    Abstract

    This essay presents a case study of the modes used in training employees at a munitions plant in Ohio between 1940 and 1945. Theories of multimodal discourse and learning advanced by The New London Group (1996), Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001) and Richard Mayer (2001) inform this analysis. With an unskilled labor force and many workers coming from oral literate traditions, the War Manpower Commission developed the Training Within Industry program, emphasizing visual and experiential literacies. This analysis can inform programs that use multimodal forms of instruction by acknowledging positive and negative implications of such literacy sponsorship.

    doi:10.25148/clj.3.2.009471
  4. Book Review: Faber, Brenton. (2007). Discourse, Technology and Change. New York: Continuum. 206 pages
    doi:10.1177/1050651908328887
  5. Early Disaster Cinema as Dysfunctional “Equipment for Living”: or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Kenneth Burke
    Abstract

    Much has been written about Burke’s famous dictum that literature is equipment for living. Many writers have assumed that he meant that all literature (high, low and experimental) performed a salubrious role for its audiences. With great daring Carlnita Greene and Christopher Greene argue that some art may be dysfunctional for its audiences, foreclosing solutions, propagandizing and narrowing rather than opening the universe of discourse.

March 2009

  1. Poetic Drama as Civic Discourse:Troilus and Cressida, an Allegory of Elizabeth I's “Common Weal”
    Abstract

    Abstract An allegoresis of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida illuminates this drama as the playwright's act of mythopoesis that characterizes and interprets the second half of Elizabeth I's reign as an historical and political journey through adversities, crises, and conflict to a moment of unified redemption. Action and dialogue allegorically represent the diverse and disparate civic voices of this journey. The drama is Shakespeare's own civic voice morally and ethically arguing and assessing the period as an arrival to national unification, self-identity, and well-being. Notes 1I offer my gratitude to RR reviewers Mark Gellis and Andrew King for their insightful recommendations, and to Theresa Jarnagin Enos and Rhetoric Review for their patience. 2Allegory of typology as relying on well-established pre-texts—in this instance, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Homer's Iliad; allegory of reification as relying on allusive tropes such as irony, metaphor, simile, pun, image, and personification that are culturally understood by the audience. See Quilligan (ad passim) and Barney (30–38). The two classes of allegory need not be mutually exclusive; they can be simultaneously incorporated into one allegorical work and can support each other to convey the author's perceptions. 3All quotations from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 4For a concise and comprehensive history of Commons' escalating voice and its rise to power, see J. E. Neale's introduction (15–29) and his conclusion (417–24) in Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–1581; and the conclusion (434–39) of Neale's Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601. Neale identifies the birth of Commons' evolving empowerment with Sir Thomas More's plea for parliamentary freedom of speech as early as 1523 during the reign of Henry VIII. 5Although probable sources, none of these names appear in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde or in George Chapman's Iliad. Only one reference to the Dardan gate appears in Lydgate's Troy Book, in which it is synonymous with the famous Scaean Gate of Iliad fame. It was referred to as the Dardan gate because it faced northwest toward the Dardanelles. Only until the twentieth century did archaeological evidence at the Troy site in Hycarlic suggest other gateway entrances in Troy's walls. 6Ordish identifies seven gates in Elizabethan London: Aldgate, Bishopgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgarte, Newgate, and Ludgate (5). However, Moorgate was considered a minor gate and originally a postern that would leave a total of six main gates for Elizabethan Londoners. The other six gates mentioned were the original six that descended from the Medieval Period. Another gate, adjacent to the Tower of London, had been demolished to construct the Tower, and only a pedestrian passageway remained. 7Graves uses an interesting turn of phrase for patronage recipients' commitment: "They also reinforced loyalty by pandering to self-interest" (114). 8The "pearl" metaphor as Elizabeth in this context in all probability held three significances for the Elizabethan audience: (1) At least from the time of the poetic works of the anonymous "Pearl Poet," the pearl signifies purity thereby affirming Elizabeth as the "Virgin Queen"; (2) Elizabeth's purity in relation to God and her Realm are divinely ordained; and (3) in like to "divine," she is ubiquitously felt yet distant and tenuous, one whose relation is not easily attained. Elizabeth's symbolic association with pearls is clearly depicted in her Pelican Portrait, c. 1575, and the Armada Portrait of 1588; her gowns and her hair are encrusted with pearls, and she is portrayed in both portraits with elaborate displays of pearl necklacing. From another perspective: In the Parliamentary session of 1597–98 when monopolies, granted under the authority of her Royal Prerogative, were being challenged by the House of Commons as lending to abuses affecting the welfare of the poor, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, quoted her response in stating: "Her Majesty … hoped that her dutiful and loving subjects would not take away her Prerogative—which is the chiefest flower in her garland and the principal and head pearl in her crown and diadem" (Neale, 1584–1601 355). 9Further exploration in identifying allegory as another separate and distinct mode of drama within the corpus of Shakespeare's plays appears viable. Preliminary examination of The Tempest has already indicated to me strong allegorical elements at work and consistent in execution with Troilus and Cressida. They lead me to consider the plays two pieces of a set as "allegory/drama"—a protracted legend of the Tudor Dynasty and its relinquishing evolution to the Stuarts. This preliminary thesis would also include Henry VIII as a necessary stage for Troilus and Tempest to complete the set as a dynastic work. 10… and possibly propaganda for Elizabeth's recent favor toward the House of Commons, also a positive assessment of her reign for the chronicles of history. 11See Dennis Slattery's discussion of mythopoesis as "the ground of narrative knowing" in Sophocles' Theban Plays and the journey from the profane to the sacred in his essay, "Oedipus at Colonus: Pilgrimage from Blight to Blessedness" (ad passim).

    doi:10.1080/07350190902739978
  2. Rogerian Principles and the Writing Classroom: A History of Intention and (Mis)Interpretation
    Abstract

    Abstract During WWII psychologist Carl Rogers introduced a verbal counseling technique that could be utilized by clergy, teachers, and USO workers to help veterans overcome problems of readjustment. Rogers's arhetorical principles were adapted for the writing classroom by Young, Becker, and Pike—an adaptation that later led composition historian James Berlin to misinterpret the implementation of Rogers's principles in his study of a WWII communication program. These misinterpretations of Rogers's original intent have resulted in debate over the rhetorical or arhetorical nature of Rogerian rhetoric and have led to an inaccurate association between Rogerian rhetoric and expressivist and therapeutic writing. Notes 1My thanks to RR reviewers Paul Bator and Janice Lauer for their detailed and helpful revision recommendations, and to my colleagues Robin Veder and Mary Richards for their generous advice on early drafts. 2 Rhetoric and Reality is required reading for many PhD programs in rhetoric and composition and as such has informed, and continues to inform, a majority of scholars in the field. Sharon Crowley cites Rhetoric and Reality as the source for her statement that "[o]ne truly radical communication skills program … was implemented at the University of Denver" (Composition 172). And David Russell refers to Rhetoric and Reality several times in support of his treatment of communications courses and expressivist writing instruction. 3Although Young, Becker, and Pike defer to Anatol Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates as a foundation for their theory, Rapoport is rarely mentioned as the initiator of either the strategies for or the terms Rogerian argument or Rogerian rhetoric. 4See Halasek; Bator; Hairston; and Ede. 5It is now (many years following the publication of the Rogers and Young et al.'s discussion) possible for Rogers's strategy of "listening" to a reader's point of view to succeed in a synchronous online chat environment, where a writer has a present/absent audience, and the reader is capable of presenting immediate feedback to the writer. 6Young, Becker, and Pike insist that the other two prongs of their Rogerian argument strategy for writers are an alternative to conventional argument, but their proposal of delineating "the area within which he believes the reader's position to be valid" and convincing the reader that he and the writer have "moral qualities (honesty, integrity, and good will)" in common seem little more than a watered-down version of Aristotle's very conventional appeal to ethos (275). 7Rogers did later validate his person-centered approach through the formation of the Carl Rogers Institute for Peace, an organization that helped ease social tensions in such troubled areas as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Central America. Perhaps it was this successful approach to social and political conflict resolution that initially attracted Young et al. to Rogers's principles and convinced them to attempt an adaptation of those same principles as an alternative to the agonistic type of argument taught in the writing classroom. 8The conventions of the Institute of General Semantics state that the term general semantics is not capitalized. 9In his introductory chapter to Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin does identify the use of general semantics as "a device for propaganda analysis" (10) and does give Denver credit for promoting "cooperative rather then competitive thinking" (101). 10Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke conducted a study for the War Department in the spring of 1943 and concluded that "nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations" due to "a thing called psychoneurosis" (11). By 1946 at least 40 percent of men receiving pensions for a physical disability were labeled as psychoneurotics, but only 10 percent of that 40 percent had seen combat. 11Archival evidence from the University of Denver reveals that enrollment rose "by 57 percent compared to the pre-war enrollments of 1939" and "the percent of Veterans on campus rose to 60 percent" (Zazzarino). 12Elbow sees the terms expressivist or expressionist as problematic and credits them both as terms of "disapproval" coined by Berlin. In defining the terms as "writing that expresses what I feel, see, think," Elbow concludes that they are "indistinguishable from any other kind of writing" ("Binary Thinking" 20). 13See also Halasek for an insightful analysis of ways in which Elbow's "Believing Game" can be applied to Rogerian principles.

    doi:10.1080/07350190902740034
  3. Tech Talk: An Investigation of Blogging in Technology Innovation Discourse
    Abstract

    Web logs, or ldquoblogs,rdquo are fast developing in diverse social and business contexts as influential sources of discourse, knowledge, and community development. In this paper, we investigate an aspect of blogging highly relevant to professional communication: the fast-developing world of ldquotech blogging.rdquo Tech blogs are blogs that focus on information technology innovation and the high-tech industry. We examine nine months of blog entries gathered by an internet aggregator site dedicated to technology news and commentary. Our analysis provides insights on the discourse of tech bloggers and an elite subgroup (ldquoA-list bloggersrdquo), on the discursive practices of this virtual community, and on issues of identity and legitimacy. Our findings hold implications for tech bloggers as well as for managers who need to navigate the expanding blogosphere and for technical communicators who can benefit from using the information that tech bloggers produce.

    doi:10.1109/tpc.2008.2012285
  4. Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of William W. Fortenbaugh ed. by David C. Mirhady
    Abstract

    Reviews David C. Mirhady, ed., Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of William W. Fortenbaugh. Leiden: Brill, 2007. viii + 282 pp. This valuable collection of fourteen essays divides itself naturally into two parts: those which conform strictly to its title (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,11,13), and the rest, which focus on Aristotle's Rhetoric (4, 14), Rhetorica Ad Alexandrian (6) and post-Aristotelian topics (7, 9, 10, 12). Mirhady's Introduction assembles the diverse elements that inform the book very skilfully: the present state of scholarship, the historical background, a synopsis of the contents of Aristotle Rhetoric and the Rhetorica Ad Alexandrian, and summaries of the fourteen chapters. Dirk Schenkeveld, Theory and Practice in Fourth-Century Eloquence, is con­ cerned with a particular feature, mainly of deliberative oratory: the speaker's adoption of a didactic tone, usually when introducing a key narrative or ar­ gument. He does not consider whether this tone is a function of the characters of its two chief proponents, Isocrates, who was a teacher, and Demosthenes, who was famously superior in his attitude to his audiences and opponents; while the examples in Lysias look suspiciously formulaic. These character­ istics would go some way to explaining the absence of recommendations for them from the theorists. In Ethos in Persuasion and in Musical Education in Plato and Aristotle, Eckart Schutrumpf finds the latter's proposition that a speaker's good character is by itself a device of persuasion too simplistic compared with the examination conducted by Plato, in whose Gorgias and Protagoras audiences are seen as more susceptible to purely rhetorical skills than to a speaker's perceived moral qualities. Schutrumpf traces a development in Plato's attitude to persuasion, with the need to replace it by force being increasingly considered. Aristotle consistently takes a more optimistic view of human nature. David Mirhady, Aristotle's Enthynienie, Thymos, and Plato, sets out to establish the emotional content of the Aristotelian enthymeme by reference to its etymology. After admitting that the verb had come to mean no more than 'consider,' Mirhady argues that the enthymeme connotes "a form of cognitive activity that takes place in the context of emotional response.'' But the enthymeme is concerned with emotions only in so far as the human experiences from which it draws its premisses have emotional content, and for Aristotle it is always closer to logic (the syllogism) than to the irrational Rhetorica, Vol. XXVII, Issue 2, pp. 218—234, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2009 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DO1: 10.1525/RH.200A27.2.218. Reviews 219 thoughts and actions of the thymos. In his Techniques of Proof in 4th Century Rhctoiic, Tobias Rheinhardt finds connections between Aristotle s Rhetoric, his dialectical theory' in the Topics, and the Rhetorica Ad Alexandrum in respect of arguments related to some of the standard themes of deliberative and forensic oratory; This chapter begins and ends with a welcome reassertion of the view that the birth of rhetorical theory is to be assigned firmly to the Fifth Century: a fact which can easily be established by noticing the recurrence of a wide array of technical proofs and topoi in Antiphon and the early speeches how Aristotle defines an ideal written text as one which is susceptible to oral performance, and that epideictic oratory is aimed at an audience which is both spectator and critic, who dissects a discourse and passes judgement on the question of whether the author/speaker has discovered all the possible means of persuasion. She notes that Aristotle differs from his predecessors in distinguishing between styles suitable for deliberative and forensic oratory. Her study also clarifies several of the obscurities in Aristotle's account of these styles by reconciling different parts of it. In Carl Werner Muller's Der Euripideische Philoktet und Die Rhetorik des 4. Jnhrhunderts the starting-point is Dion of Prusa's opinion that the rhetorical content of Euripides Philoctetes distinguishes it from its Aeschylean and...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0016
  5. Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric by Susan Miller
    Abstract

    Reviews 233 allows for a comparison so general, one might doubt its usefulness. “Painting is really like poetry/' van Eck writes, “because both arts are inventions that make appear things that do not exist" (p. 68). Yet the point of van Eek's book is not to show how painting and architecture are the same as rhetoric, but how a culture saturated with the lessons of classical rhetoric influenced the creation and reception of visual art. In fact, rather than primarily focusing on works of visual art and architecture, the book is actually more concerned with the way early modern artists, architects, and spectators spoke and wrote about the visual arts. This is the book's strength, as example after example reveals that classical rhetorical theory provided a rich mine for both artists seeking to describe their method and spectators accounting for their reaction to the artwork. The discussion (in chapter fixe) of poetic responses to the discovery of the Lnocoon statue in 1506 is particularly interesting in this regard. The responses laud the power of the statue to move the viewer while drawing on the language of classical rhetorical theorv. As a whole van Eek's studv is a compelling and welcome contribution to the growing body of work on earlv modern visual culture, broadly defined. Through careful readings of a v ariety of early modern texts about art and architecture from England and Italy, she is able to show how rhetoric influ­ enced the theory, practice and reception of the visual arts. The book serves as a correctiv e to art historical approaches based on theories of aesthetics and style after Kant that downplay the instrumental character of much early modern art. To accomplish this, though, the variety of rhetorical theory is necessarily placed in the background to allow for the common threads that tie rhetoric to the v isual arts in van Eek's account to come into relief. For those interested in early modern European visual culture this will seem a small price to pay. James A. Knapp Eastern Michigan University Susan Miller, Trust in Texts: A Different History ofRhetoric. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. xiv + 224 pp. This is an astute, ingenious, and inclusive survey of the contemporary Anglophone discussion that centers on what Miller considers the rhetorical core: that is, pedagogy, training for discursive performance—either in civil affairs or in "self-fashioning," techniques of representation of the practi­ tioner for both public and private motives. That is, both teaching-practice and practice-practice. Tier vital distinction is the prefix meta . rhetoric engages "multiple metadiscourses derived from ritual, imaginative, affil iative practices" (p. 1). Rhetoric as pedagogy is obviously meta-discourse, discourse about discourse; it can, or should, invest in meta-discursive 234 RHETORICA controlling, important—discourses that form and are formed by vital, specific life-interests. On the one hand, the multiple metadiscourses are practices 1) "that we trust for their well-supported and reasoned statements", or 2) "for their participation in infrastructures of trustworthiness," products of "special plane[s] of understanding, and [their] consequences" (p. 2). But, on the other hand, pedagogy, as schooling in the conditions of trust, deals also with trust, not in reason and the shared infrastructure, but with uncertainty, bad faith; it functions "symbolically and charismatically" (p. 3), it can be a "retreat to the orphic" (p. 147). Still, it is always creating "contexts for choice" in an "emergent present" (p. 3) responding—she cites John O. Ward—to "distinct market niches" (p. 4), or, preferably to universal/human, national, global niches. Thus, rhetoric is hegemonous: powerful in its contribution to "productivity and stature of the present [whatever] age," or to "the circulation of contemporary values" (p. 37). As hegemonous, omnicompetent: the study considers political ideolo­ gies, literary aspirations, social ambitions, power contests, gender definings, genre strategies. Rhetoric can be reformulated as concerned with "ad hoc, class-based, experiential, and especially educational bonds that enable per­ suasion" (p. 53). Anything, in short, "crucial to monitoring, reprocessing, and delivering the limits of trust" (p. 5). There is, as well, a very strong emphasis on the pertinent contributions of emotional as well as cognitive capacities. Indeed, a large...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0020
  6. The Rhetoric of Passion in Donne’s Holy Sonnets
    Abstract

    In his Holy Sonnets, the English Renaissance poet and divine John Donne (1572–1631) gives voice to powerful emotional outbursts. Previous critics have mostly been concerned with the religious context and theological positions of the sonnets. This study rather attempts to isolate the psychological context of the poems by relating them to the early modern discourse on the passions. In order to grasp the pathos of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, we need to consider the advice on how to handle violent emotion in such treatises as Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640).

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0014
  7. La fonction héroïque: Parole épidictique et enjeux de qualification
    Abstract

    The present contribution to the analysis of the rhetorical genre of eulogy and blame proposes to approach this oratorical undertaking from the point of view of its performative action on praxis. The question is to clarify the conditions of the possibility of this eminently ritual exercise of qualification of the world that attempts, by emphasizing the value of a figure that is rather singular, that of the "hero," to express the present of a community and to program passing to the act. The goal of our reflection consists in showing how the epideictic genre, by the confirmation of a meaning actualized by the speech act, strives to establish and fix the properties of things and consecrate the symbolic forms that can present themselves as justification of a collective action.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0012

January 2009

  1. Arithmetic of the Species: Darwin and the Role of Mathematics in his Argumentation
    Abstract

    Historians of science resist recognizing a role for mathematics in The Origin of Species on the grounds that Darwin’s arguments are inductive and mathematics is deductive, while rhetoricians seem to oppose the idea that deductive mathematical arguments fall within the jurisdiction of rhetorical analysis. A close textual analysis of the arguments in The Origin and a careful examination of the methodological/philosophical context in which Darwin is doing science, however, challenges these objections against and assumptions about the role of mathematical warrants in Darwin’s arguments and their importance to his rhetorical efforts in the text.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2009.0024
  2. Citizenship as Salvation: The 1963 Mississippi Freedom Vote
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay is an attempt at primary resource recovery to inform an under-studied moment from the Civil Rights Movement—the 1963 Mississippi Freedom Vote. Analysis of these primary texts reveals how the campaign used religious narratives and discourse to create political efficacy and agency among disenfranchised voters in Mississippi. It is this rhetorical transformation that holds the key to understanding how and why over 80,000 blacks who had never before participated in any sustained and organized political campaign chose to do so in the fall of 1963. Exploring these texts and events with a nuanced eye for religious and political discourse reveals how a rhetorical transformation from religious believers to political agents came about, and why it was successful in an overshadowed moment from the Civil Rights Movement.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2009.10597384
  3. From Glasnost to Disappointment: Bulgarian Presidential Discourse in a Time of Transition
    Abstract

    Research Article| January 01 2009 From Glasnost to Disappointment: Bulgarian Presidential Discourse in a Time of Transition Martin Marinos Martin Marinos Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Advances in the History of Rhetoric (2009) 11-12 (1): 319–357. https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2009.10597389 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Martin Marinos; From Glasnost to Disappointment: Bulgarian Presidential Discourse in a Time of Transition. Advances in the History of Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 11-12 (1): 319–357. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2009.10597389 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 All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressJournal for the History of Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 by the American Society for the History of Rhetoric2010the American Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2009.10597389
  4. Plenary Rhetoric in Indian Country: TheLone Wolf v. HitchcockCase and the Codification of a Weakened Native Character
    Abstract

    AbstractThe U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 as a part of its assimilationist plan to remake American Indians in the image of the U.S. nation. The act helped constitute a changed Native identity as it contracted reservation lines and forced an agricultural economy onto Native reservations. The Supreme Court case Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) resulted from American Indian protests of the Dawes Act, including the argument that the assimilationist plan had been implemented against Natives' will. The resulting decision granted Congress the ultimate “plenary” power to abrogate treaties without any limits because American Indians were wards. Through an analysis of the case and Indian Commissioner reports addressing plenary power, I argue that the Lone Wolf holding served as an imperial discourse that maligned American Indian identities through a parent-child relationship. This denigration manifested through Lone Wolf's construction of American Indians as cultural wards, its reduction of Native property to commodity through a westernized economic plan, and its assimilation of Native communities into dominant U.S. culture. In addition, I contend that the Lone Wolf case solidified a wider U.S. nationalism by emboldening federal power over indigenous communities through a familial rhetorical strategy.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2009.10597380
  5. Finding a Voice: Reconciling Discourse in Student Work
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2009.20.1.05