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January 2020

  1. Zionism's “Mighty Leap”: A Rhetorical History of Dr. Karpel Lippe's Address to the First Zionist Congress in Basel, 1897
    Abstract

    As honorary president and first speaker at the First Zionist Congress, Dr. Karpel Lippe of Romania embodied continuities in the history of the Jews and of Zionism, but his address also heralded transformations occurring in the movement as its delegates assembled in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. The speech, given in German, is analyzed with respect to its multiplex audience and other aspects of the rhetorical situation. Lippe declares the Congress to be a gewaltiger Sprung (mighty leap): the “leap” refers to the reinvention of Zionism as a solidly modern, middle-class movement, as shown by its leadership, language, repertoires of action, and values. Those values—positivism with respect to social and historical knowledge; individual self-reliance, secular work, and “civilization”; deprecation of indolence and dependency; and a respectful but assertive engagement with the established political-economic order—are set over against the social and ideological equivocations, administrative paternalism, and political timidity that caused its predecessor, Hibbat Zion, to falter.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0675
  2. Book Review: From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History
    doi:10.1177/1050651919874349

December 2019

  1. Medical Rhetoric and the Sympathetic “Inebriet”: 1870–1930
    Abstract

    The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the sec­ond half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a dis­interested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical jour­nals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced under­standing of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those sys­tems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction.

    doi:10.5744/rhm.2019.1019
  2. RSTM at the Intersection of Feminism and Identity
    Abstract

    Booher, Amanda K., & Jung, Julie. (Eds.) (2018). Feminist rhetori­cal science studies: Human bodies, posthumanist worlds. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 274. Paperback $45.00.Yergeau, Melanie. (2017). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neuro­logical queerness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 312. Cloth $104.95, Paperback $27.95.Koerber, Amy. (2018). From hysteria to hormones: A rhetorical history. University Park: Penn State University Press. pp. 264. Cloth $99.95, Paperback $34.95.

    doi:10.5744/rhm.2019.1021

November 2019

  1. Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism
    Abstract

    The socially tumultuous Chicago of the 1890s—epicenter of the Pullman Strike of 1894, home to immigrants, site of a new kind of urban poverty—also saw the birth of two monumental projects in American pragmatism: John Dewey's pioneering work in education at the University of Chicago in 1896 and Jane Addams's founding of Hull House in 1889. Dewey and Addams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy on behalf of immigrants and the poor, were close collaborators as they developed the theory and practice of pragmatism. Addams is not the overt focus of Robert Danisch's book Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism, but Hull House, its founder, and that social project are recurring touchstones throughout, serving as exemplars of the themes his title suggests. Danisch asserts that American pragmatism's key commitment is to social democracy, arguing as Dewey and other pragmatists have that democracy is “not just a system of government” but “a way of life.” Civic-oriented projects such as Dewey's experimental school in Chicago and Addams's settlement house “made that argument real.” Indeed, one might say that making the American pragmatist philosophy “real”—to concretize it in our communities and daily lives, in our social interactions, speeches, and deliberations—is Danisch's purpose here. To not do so is to leave idle and unused “America's greatest intellectual contribution to the world.”To renew democracy and fulfill its greater promise—as Danisch claims in this book and Dewey in The Public and Its Problems—we must revitalize how we communicate. Because both the nature of existence and the social fabric of America are marked by contingency, uncertainty, and pluralism, it is through rhetorical communication that we find the “principal means of coping.” While Dewey valorizes communication explicitly throughout his work, he does not specifically discuss “rhetoric.” However, Danisch is right to say that often when Dewey is writing about communication, he actually means rhetoric. For Danisch, communication is a “broad, constitutive process of making meaning” whereas rhetoric is a “narrower, more focused kind of ‘communication’ practice related to the long civic tradition of rhetorical studies.” In the Greek tradition, rhetoric was “the artful use of language … capable of generating some degree of order out of uncertainty and ambiguity,” a practice and purpose Dewey certainly embraced, if not the word itself. Thus, in his project to recover and make use of rhetorical resources from the American pragmatist tradition, Danisch makes a distinction between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism. His core argument is that pragmatists such as Dewey developed the philosophical strand of pragmatism, which formed strong underpinnings for a rhetorical strand of pragmatism, but that the neopragmatists failed to complete the rhetorical turn, leaving it to others to realize the socially constructive potential of rhetorical pragmatism.The book's argument is organized in three parts. In the first part, Danisch follows his account of traditional pragmatism's implicit valuing of social democracy and rhetoric with a sustained criticism of mainstream neopragmatism's alleged neglect of both. In the second part, he explores the origins of a rhetorical turn in pragmatism within the works of relatively unknown figures outside of mainstream philosophy—“the lost voices of pragmatism”—during the mid-twentieth century. In the third part, he proposes to demonstrate how rhetorical pragmatism can be put into practice.Although traditional American pragmatism clearly valued communication as the fundamental process of democracy and community life, Dewey and others neglected to give clear guidance on how to enact a pragmatist rhetoric. In the work of neopragmatists Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Cornel West, the author sees a missed opportunity to make a much-needed turn toward rhetoric as the practical means to renew American social democracy. In Danisch's analysis, we see that Rorty, while full of praise for pragmatism, fails to fully move from philosophical issues to practical, rhetorical solutions. Rorty's linguistic turn makes for an “inconsequential” kind of pragmatism, one ironically still mired in traditional philosophical problems, which have no real impact on social democracy. One might object, thinking of Rorty's commitment to “edifying conversation” for instance, but as Danisch attempts to show, Rorty's offering is “thin” at best compared to Dewey's. Turning to Fish's contribution to neopragmatism, Danisch cites the eminent literary analyst's commitment to anti-foundationalism, which traditional pragmatists share. But his brand of anti-foundationalism makes Fish wary of social projects, which, as Danisch contends, shows Fish's “flawed” understanding of both pragmatism and its rhetorical resources. In the cases of Rorty and Fish, both approach rhetoric in unhelpful ways, but as problematic for Danisch is their disregard for, practically speaking, the search for ways to build social democracy. West, on the other hand, is more clearly committed to social democracy. And yet, according to Danisch, “West reads communication … out of the pragmatist tradition.” Danisch also sees West's focus on Socrates as the “model and hero” of philosophy as emblematic of the problem. Socrates's penchant for speculative philosophy, his misgivings toward democracy, and his hostility toward rhetoric work against the social democratic project. The neopragmatists are caught in the postmodern turn, deconstruction, and the “university's abstract pursuit of knowledge,” such that they fail to “answer the how question.” And much like the other neopragmatists, West is caught within traditional philosophical problems, blind to the need for real, practical, rhetorical solutions to actual, current social problems—emphasis on rhetorical. Readers' reception of Danisch's argument will rest much on how well they take to heart his critique of academic philosophy as well as his valuation of rhetoric and its fundamental necessity to meliorating social problems.At this point, Danisch turns to what he calls “outliers” in the history of pragmatism to find a deliberate, effective turn from merely philosophical pragmatism to the “promises” of rhetorical pragmatism. Readers already familiar with the intellectual history of American pragmatism might find Danisch's recovery of these “lost voices” of pragmatism enlightening, and perhaps of most interest. The first figure, Richard McKeon, was a student of Dewey and a teacher of Rorty. McKeon's focus on rhetoric and practical solutions to problems—he was instrumental in the development of UNESCO as well as being an academic—caused him to fall outside the mainstream of philosophy. Yet his development of a new rhetoric as “a universal and architectonic art”—uniting philosophers and rhetoricians in one enterprise, promoting interdisciplinary communication and “the art of doing”—makes a key, if underappreciated, contribution to the “pivot” from philosophical pragmatism to rhetorical pragmatism Danisch wants to make. Another academic to make this pivot was Hugh Dalziel Duncan, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. Duncan was a close associate of Kenneth Burke, whom Danisch also treats as a pivotal figure—though his contribution is sketched lightly here. “Both are a useful resource for the development of contemporary pragmatism,” Danisch argues, “because they provide the means by which we can explain how communication works within democratic societies, what effect communicative practices produce, and why communication is necessary in the maintenance of social order.” Again, communication here in the pragmatist sense means rhetoric—communicative practices that work toward changing society and constructing social democracy.The resources for rhetorical pragmatism, dormant in the tradition, unrealized in neopragmatism, elaborated by little-known pragmatist thinkers during the middle of the twentieth century, come to fruition in the final section of the book, “The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism.” Here, Danisch touches on Hull House once again, because for him it constitutes what he calls a “rhetorical structure.” It is actual concrete institutions like Hull House—a place where people commune, deliberate, and commit to action—that provide the structure necessary for rhetoric to fulfill its purpose. They enable what Danisch calls “deliberative ecologies,” a concept that honors how communication is not mere transmission but a complex web of interconnected persons, environments, social structures, and symbols. Danisch goes on to analyze the Occupy Wall Street movement to examine what he calls “rhetorical citizenship.” By this he means “a citizen is not just someone in possession of legal status within a state. A citizen is also a person engaged in rhetorical practices that help shape the process of decision-making.” Drawing on C. S. Peirce, he uses the OWS movement to show how a Peircean commitment to inquiry is fundamental to a rhetorical kind of citizenship. Another fundamental is artistry, which is a key aspect of Dewey's work. To illustrate artistry, Danisch draws on another relatively unknown figure, Donald Schön, a philosopher, sometime academic, and student of Dewey. Speaking of the art of conversation and improvisation, Schön wrote that a rhetorically minded citizen ought to be comfortable with uncertainty and be willing to experiment in the face of the unknown. Finally, Danisch ties the foregoing together with a final concept necessary for the fulfillment of a rhetorical pragmatism: “rhetorical leadership.” Such a leader demonstrates, supports, and teaches “an array of communication practices able to aid in the coordination, collaboration and cooperation of plural, diverse groups of citizens.” As examples of rhetorical leadership aside from Addams, Danisch offers William James as a circuit lecturer, Saul Alinsky's community organizing, and Barack Obama's first presidential campaign.In addition to foregrounding these rhetorical leaders and recovering the “lost voices” of pragmatism, the main value of Building a Social Democracy is its exhortation for scholars of communication, rhetoric, and democracy to study and fulfill American pragmatism's rich offering for renewing our democratic way of life. In response to questions raised by pragmatic rhetorical leaders such as Addams, it will not suffice to “spin out analytical explanations.” We must, as Dewey put it, commit to developing and enacting “the art of full and moving communication.”

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.52.4.0419
  2. Making Feminist Rhetorical History Five Pages at a Time: A Cross-Institutional Writing Group for Mid-Career Women in the Academy
  3. The Nan Johnson Collection and Archival Research Award

September 2019

  1. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel ed. by Robert Sullivan, Arthur E. Walzer, and: Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel ed. David R. Carlson
    Abstract

    424 RHETORICA balances well her recovery of nineteenth-century women's cookbooks with a critique of "the pervasive social ordering system" of taste in the nine­ teenth century (p. 4). Offering the first book-length study of women's cookbooks as rhetorical texts, Walden makes a valuable contribution to scholarly conversations in interdisciplinary studies of food and food his­ tory, feminist histories of rhetoric, and the history of nineteenth-century American rhetorics. Paige V. Banaji Barry University Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, eds. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pp. ISBN 978904365100; David R. Carlson, ed. Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel. Cambridge, UK: Modem Humanities Research Association, 2018. 345 pp. ISBN 9781781886205 After a brief and unsuccessful career as a diplomat, Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) retreated to his estates and his library and to two life-long scholarly endeavors, the enrichment of the English language and the proper mode of national governance. The former is a task of some interest: it has its flowering a half century later in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney. But it is the latter task that is the subject of the two books now under review, one an edition per se, the other an edition and a monograph welded together. Both books publish three dialogues, Pasquill the Playne, Of That Knowlage Which Maketh a Wise Man, and The Defense of Good Women, and one treatise, The Doctrinal of Princes. Only Carson includes The Image of Governance, a book on the duty of kingship in the form of an idealized biography of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus. Between these two books, published virtually simultaneously, there is obviously a great deal of overlap, a circumstance that permits us to reflect on the state of academic publishing as well as on the optimal means of editing and con­ textualizing printed Tudors texts. Before turning to this task, however, we need to say something about the works themselves in the context of the humanist revival in England. A work in translation from the Greek, The Doctrinal of Prince permits Sullivan and Walzer to address the state of learning in Tudor England and to underline the remarkable fact that Elyot's translation may well have been the first directly from the Greek. That without the benefit of any schooling Elyot should undertake the task says a great deal both about him and about the flowering of English scholarship in the Tudor Age. Elyot's focus on the accuracy of his translation is salutary as well. In the first edition, he rendered the Greek "and that they may suppose howe to counsaile for their weal than themselves." In the second edition, this is revised to "that thei maie suppose that you canst counsaile them better tor their weale Reviews 425 than thei can them selfes," a more accurate rendering of the Greek, and a tribute to Elyot's meticulous concern. Despite a concern for translation, rhetorical style is less a focus of Sullivan and Walzer than genre. The Doctrinal of Princes is identified as an Isocratian parainesis, advice to a young prince on proper royal behavior. Its structure is simple, an introduction designed to lay down precepts for monarchs followed by the precepts themselves followed by a short epi­ logue, resembling a peroration. The advice is deliberately not specific. Here is a sample admonition: "Haue no lasse dominion or rule ouer they selfe, than ouer other" (Sullivan and Walzer, 104). This and its fellow admo­ nitions so smack of Polonius's sententiousness that one wonders why Elyot felt compelled to reach back to ancient Greece to retrieve it; one wonders, that is, until one realizes that Elyot was living in the reign of a monarch with a strong tendency to ignore good advice. The genres of two of Elyot's dialogues are a topic of debate. Is Pasquill the Playne modeled on Platonic dialogues, or on later ones by Lucian? Sullivan and Walzer opt for the latter on two grounds: Elyot recommended Lucian in the Governour and he characterized Pasquill as "mery." Although many of Lucian's dialogues can be characterized as...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0005

August 2019

  1. Reducing harm by designing discourse and digital tools for opioid users' contexts: the Chicago Recovery Alliance's community-based context of use and PwrdBy's technology-based context of use
    Abstract

    The United States is struggling with an opioid overdose (OD) crisis. The opioid OD epidemic includes legally prescribed and illicitly acquired opioids. Regardless of if an opioid is legal, understanding users' contexts of use is essential to design effective methods for individuals to reverse opioid OD. In other words, if health information is not designed to be contextually relevant, the opioid OD health information will be unusable. To demonstrate these distinct healthcare design contexts, I extend Patient Experience Design (PXD) to include community-based and technology-based contexts of use by analyzing two case examples of the Chicago Recovery Alliance's and PwrdBy's attempts to decrease deaths by opioid OD. Next, I discuss implications of community-based and technology-based PXD within communities of opioid users, critiquing each method and suggesting four contexts of use-heuristic categories to consider when designing health communication information for users in these contexts.

    doi:10.1145/3358931.3358935

June 2019

  1. Turning Archives into Data: Archival Rhetorics and Digital Literacy in the Composition Classroom
    Abstract

    Using assignments drawn from a first-year composition course that centers the Southern Life Histories Collection, part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, this paper argues for a pedagogical approach that teaches students digital literacy through archival rhetorics by converting archival texts into data.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201930178

May 2019

  1. Diversity in and among Rhetorical Traditions
    Abstract

    Rhetoric often serves as a way to bridge important differences in the act of persuasion. As a field, rhetoric has worked to include more and more diverse voices. Much more is left to be written, however, on how this admittedly important concept of diversity affects the study and practice of rhetoric. This volume of Advances in the History of Rhetoric serves as a material trace of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s recent attempts to highlight diversity in and among rhetorical traditions. It collects essays from those presented at the 2018 symposium on the theme of “Diversity and Rhetorical Traditions.” All of these essays were subjected to additional review to fine-tune their arguments for this special journal issue. Each displays the perils and promises of engaging diversity as a topic within – and among – rhetorical traditions. Part of the challenge of coming to terms with difference is the confrontation with something, be it a tradition, a thinker, or a text, that challenges one’s own way of understanding the world, possible accounts of it, and our structures of reasoning and justification. Marking something as “different” is better than marking that person, text, or tradition as “wrong” or “misguided.” Coming to terms with – and even simply recognizing – difference is an accomplishment, especially when it’s not followed by dismissal or rejection. We too often default to the familiar – familiar texts and standards of judgment.These tensions over engaging differences in texts and people are the classical challenges facing comparative endeavors and the field that explores diversity among rhetorical traditions–known as comparative rhetoric – has made progress in navigating these demands. Early studies in the rhetorical practices of “non-western cultures” (a term that highlights the normative challenges of difference in naming objects of study) served as important, but imperfect, starting points. For instance, Robert T. Oliver’s 1971 book, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, represents one of the first sustained enquiries into the rhetoric of China and India, putatively on their own terms. It was a grand project, ambitious in its aims. Yet in his pursuit of respecting difference in these traditions from the familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, some have argued that Oliver emphasized a “deficiency model” that emphasized Chinese or Indian rhetorics’ lack of some key characteristic (according to Western models of thought) such as logic or rational argument (Lu “Studies and Development” 112). George Kennedy’s ambitious book, Comparative Rhetoric, is a useful entry in bringing a global and systematic sense to the idea of comparative rhetoric, but it could also be faulted by its placement of the Greco-Roman tradition as a normative telos lying at the end of the rhetorical progression chartered over the course of its chapters.Building on the approach enshrined in these important endeavors, other scholars continued to interrogate difference among and between rhetorical traditions by focusing on similarities among different cultural practices. There is tension, however, over how much difference scholars attribute to different rhetorical traditions situated in radically different cultural contexts in the act of comparison. Are they commensurable? Do they both practice and theorize the same thing denoted by the term “rhetoric?” Another question arises as to the difference in epistemic access to these different traditions: who has the best access to unpack what a tradition means or implies about rhetoric? Some scholars give contemporary “natives” a special value as epistemically privileged resources in understanding long-rooted traditions of thought (Lu “Studies and Development” 113–114; Mao “Studying the Chinese”). Contrary to these positions which respect the rhetorical traditions of other cultures by walling them off (to some extent) from access by outsiders, other approaches deemphasize ideas of privileged access and focus on the method of appropriating resources and concepts from one tradition for the use in or by another tradition. Underlying all of these efforts and decision points are ontological assumptions about the objects of study (Is a tradition one thing or a diverse and conflicting set of texts, ideas, and authors?) and ethical entailments about the method of reconciling difference to one’s own tradition (How much creative rereading do we allow of another tradition?). Some have argued for – or at least asserted – that traditions can be “captured” in acts of scholarly inquiry more or less accurately, and we should thereby discount scholarship that fails some criterion of accuracy (Mao “Doing Comparative Rhetoric”; Hum and Lyon). Appealing to accuracy, even if it is possible to find a way to compare one’s attempts at descriptions to the “thing” that is being described, seems to overly limit how we might creatively engage, use, and understand diverse and different traditions (Stroud “Pragmatism,” “‘Useful Irresponsibility”). These debates about respect, accuracy, and appropriation intersect in complex ways with the previously mentioned tensions over whether “rhetoric” points to the same things and practices in diverse traditions. One point of agreement among many in these debates, however, remains: the reduction of traditions – or their “rhetoric” – to essential similarities or the reading of diverse traditions as absolutely (and incommensurately) different are less-than-useful orientations to engaging difference in rhetorical traditions. Both would paralyze us, perhaps in the service of cherished values (protecting or respecting the diverse Other), and they seem to preclude a full engagement with that which differs from our ordinary traditions, concepts, and practices. Beyond these extremes lies a middle path of creative and unique approaches to how we learn from, respect, and engage others. Difference is the problematic that drives the challenges to such an endeavor, as well as the ground for what we might construct in our contemporary accounts once we submit to listening to another tradition, speaker, or text outside of our habitual haunts.In their own ways, each of the studies collected here engage and respect difference within rhetorical traditions, even though there is a radical diversity in the traditions analyzed for this endeavor. This issue has a loose organizational pattern necessitated by this energetic but sometimes frenetic frame-shifting inherent in comparative rhetoric. The first two articles explore sources of diversity and difference within the Chinese tradition. Xing Lu’s keynote address extends her previous work on classical and contemporary Chinese rhetorical practices and highlights the ways that the Chinese tradition encompassed a radical diversity of thought, from Confucian views of benevolent rhetorical practice to the Daoists’ transcendental rhetoric. As she highlights, there was a remarkable amount of diversity within each “school” of Chinese rhetorical thought, and there was much conflict among and between these schools as they sought to come to terms with difference in accounts of moral cultivation, rhetorical practice, and the normative uses of language. The second article, authored by Rya Butterfield, also explores the differences in the Chinese tradition, albeit as viewed from a contemporary thinker who was pragmatically oriented toward making sense of conflicting classical schools of thought. Hu Shih, a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University, sought in his recovery of the classical traditions of Chinese thought resources to solve pressing Chinese and international exigencies. As Butterfield discusses, Hu is modern in his engagement with Chinese classical sources, and he draws upon or uses resources from the west (including Greece) in how he rereads classical Chinese culture in light of China’s contemporary needs. In many ways, Hu’s rhetoric represents a pragmatist approach to striking (and constructing) a balance between modernization and preservation of China’s past schools of thought and habits of living.There are good reasons for diversifying our canon of rhetoric, as well as our methods and objects of study, by reaching out to other traditions around the globe, but there is also a value to recovering sources of differences in a tradition that our histories might overlook. The next three articles explore the problematic of difference within the Greco-Roman tradition, highlighting sources of overlooked diversity within a dominant tradition in western rhetorical studies. Kathleen S. Lamp’s keynote address engages various types of public epideictic artifacts in Augustan Rome and illustrates how they function as propagandistic and educational efforts to reconcile differences within the Roman populace. Lamp does an admirable job showing the needs of rhetoric in light of the diversity of the Roman public, as well as the rich functioning of public artworks and monuments that can also shed light on how American monuments might serve similar goals. In a related spirit, Robert E. Terrill’s article appropriates a vital concept for Greek and Roman rhetoricians, imitatio, and engages modern concerns with inclusion in rhetorical pedagogy and argument among a diverse public. Terrill’s piece shows that creative engagement with traditions and their resources can add nuance to our understanding, as well as amplify their relevance to contemporary concerns in our pluralistic communities. By reimagining mimetic pedagogy within a context of diversity, Terrill shows how Greco-Roman rhetorical sources allow room for inventive encounters with diverse publics. The third piece engaging diversity within the western tradition is authored by Janet M. Atwill and Josie Portz. Their study challenges contemporary extensions – and critiques – of the western tradition that assume its relative homogeneity. By exploring in more detail Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” Atwill and Portz challenge simplistic readings of the western tradition by highlighting sources of difference, diversity, tension, and intercultural encounter within its supposedly straightforward history. By “unwriting” the narrative of Western civilization with an attention to tensions and differences within Aristides as received and as could be read, the authors illustrate how the thematic of difference can yield new insights into enduring traditions in the history of rhetoric.The final two articles in this issue emphasize rhetoric’s diverse history in traditions and genres that often escape our attention. Elif Guler and Iklim Goksel make important first steps in a project that should receive more attention in our field – that of explicating Turkish rhetoric. By focusing on two key rhetorical moments in the history of Turkish rhetoric, the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927), they mark a valuable beginning to studying the rhetoric of this complex culture. These two texts are important, as the Orkhon inscriptions date from the pre-Islamic period and Atatürk is considered the founder and first president of modern Turkey. Guler and Goksel creatively show how these different texts from historically distinct times are made to speak to common and divergent interests in Turkish history, showing the promise of studying traditions different from the standard Greco-Roman one. The final article continues this engagement with long-standing traditions outside of those in many standard histories of rhetoric: that of the Hindu tradition. Elizabeth Thornton examines important hymns within the Rigveda, in light of concepts and tools taken from later sources in Indian traditions, and finds that there is a unique rhetorical use of form and voice in this foundational Hindu text. Thornton’s piece is also of interest to those attuned to the methodological challenges of engaging texts outside of the western tradition, since she offers an interesting discussion of how decolonializing rhetorical history will commit us to (sometimes) using native theoretical resources.What all of these pieces highlight is the promise of thinking of rhetoric’s history with an emphasis on divergences, tensions caused by differences, and spaces that lie between our accustomed answers and intellectual habits. Rhetoric has always been diverse and has always had to bridge over differences in the act of persuasion; our contemporary history of rhetoric and its traditions must mirror this diversity in scholarly practices. Many talk highly of inclusion and multiculturalism, but few of us read or speak of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, or Bhimrao Ambedkar as rhetorically interesting parts in our histories of rhetoric’s past. There is no principled reason for this oversight, and it may be rectified slowly as the world becomes more globalized and as Asian nations such as China and India gain in economic, military, and political importance. But valuing and emphasizing diversity could lead us to pay more attention to divergences both within the rhetorical tradition many of us were trained in, as well as between this tradition and the range of other grand traditions animating other regions of the globe for millennia, well in advance of such geopolitical and economic shifts. Through resisting the urge for simplistic stories and one-dimensional critiques of cultures and their values, diversifying our histories of rhetoric promises to yield new narratives and inventive readings of well-known sources that will invigorate rhetoric as a discipline.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2019.1618051

April 2019

  1. Breaking Free While Locked Up: Rewriting Narratives of Authority, Addiction, and Recovery via University-Community Partnership
    Abstract

    This article shares first-hand experiences and reflections of individuals who participated in a community writing project between university students and women incarcerated and participating in a therapeutic community (TC) in Washington state. Together, the students and women explored the causes, impacts, and treatment of addiction and designed an online platform to share their writing, artwork, and research about the issues that have shaped their lives. Through the reflections of the participants and sponsors, common themes—such as navigating dynamics of stereotypes and authority, reframing narratives of transformation, and building connections through both empathy and alterity—emerge. This article explores the opportunities and complexities that emerge when unincarcerated university students and incarcerated writers collaborate to create a project to help reshape rhetorics not only about addiction and recovery within a carceral setting but also about the potential of a liberatory experience within such a setting.

    doi:10.59236/rjv19i1pp165-185
  2. Applying Archival Methods and Methodologies to Public Open Records
  3. It Is All There: From Reason to Reasoning-in-the-World
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT The emergence of narratives concerning post-truth, alternative facts, fake news, and the like underpins a felt sense of crisis about the possibility of debate, insofar as argument depends on truth norms. This essay argues that the post-truth narrative is regressive. It depends on Enlightenment-derived standards of truth that were from the beginning impoverished. I argue that rather than appeal nostalgically to the past, we should look to arguments interior to rhetorical history that point to truth norms that include worldly experience, or thereness. Using examples from Protagoras, Johann Georg Hamann, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I briefly expand on different ways of conceiving how to marry worldly involvements to our conceptions of knowledge. The world, inclusive of radical technological change, doesn't just shape but takes part in who we are and what we know, say, and do. In this sense, argument and debate are ambient phenomena.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.52.1.0093

March 2019

  1. Antebellum American Women’s Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment by Wendy Dasler Johnson
    Abstract

    Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo­ lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho­ lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his­ tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub­ category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop­ erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor­ ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John­ son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso­ nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal­ yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo­ ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0023
  2. Feature: Editing, Translation, and Recovery Work in Community College English Classes
    Abstract

    This article positions community college students as co-researchers who participate in the author’s inquiry into the rhetorical practices of anthology editors.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc201930067

January 2019

  1. The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory
    Abstract

    O’Connell’s Rhetoric of Seeing joins a growing list of titles interested in restoring performance and visuality to our understanding of ancient Greek culture and, especially, political and legal culture. This work distinguishes itself through its limited focus on the rhetorical function of seeing and visuality in extant forensic speeches. Each chapter addresses a different kind of seeing, often beginning with an overview of the relevant secondary literature, then considering other ancient genres or fields—Plato and Aristotle, poetry or history, medical or rhetorical treatises, and finally examining two or three important or representative examples from legal speeches. O’Connell divides the work into three “kinds” of seeing.First, he looks at what the audience can literally see. Part 1, “Physical Sight,” considers examples of visual bias concerning the physical appearance of litigants or others. This includes familiar arguments from probability (eikos) based on appearance: one need only look at Antigenes to know that he could not have overpowered Pantainetos (Demosthenes 37, Against Pantainetos); a glance at the pensioner’s disability and we can see that the charge of hubris is ridiculous (Lysias 31, For the Disabled Man). It is surprising here that O’Connell does not do more with the visual aspect of eikos arguments, which are said to have begun with Hermes’ infantile appeal to his own youth in his defense speech against Apollo: “Do I look like a cattle driver to you, a burly fellow?” (Hymn to Hermes 265). This is a central and well-trod aspect of ancient rhetorical theory that seems to call out for inclusion and that could have been given a new layer of interpretation through O’Connell’s visual approach. Counter-probability is rare in legal arguments but equally important in the development of rhetorical theory and with similar implications for visual rhetoric. The strong (or young) man who asserts that he would not have assaulted the weak (or old) man because he would be the first suspected depends in part upon similarly visible features of his person (Antiphon 2.2.3; cf. Aristotle 2.24.10–11).The final chapter of Part 1 takes up issues of movement and gesture, with references to gesture in Plato and Aristotle, a brief review of physiognomy, and then a discussion of Aeschines’ widely studied Against Timarkhos. There is brief mention of the rhetorical cannon of delivery or hupokrisis and the recommendations of Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysius and more recent work on categories of gesture by Karsouris and Hughes, but O’Connell does not take up the rhetorical canon of delivery (hupokrisis) in depth. His discussion of delivery faces the same problems that most scholars face: there simply is no good way to talk about it as a general category. Either atomize the body to talk about hands, then faces, then movement, or settle for vague gestural and expressive categories and recommendations: modest and appropriate or excessive and inappropriate. Attending to specific cases and speeches is often more successful. O’Connell’s discussion of Aeschines’ speech Against Timarkhos goes further toward demonstrating his overall thesis than do his general comments.Second, we can observe the language of visuality in the speech itself, when the speaker asks the audience to look at something literally and directly as visual evidence, or figuratively or indirectly through terms of demonstration, display, and witnessing. Part 2, “The Language of Demonstration and Visibility,” looks at terms of seeing in the orations: deiknumi (demonstrate or display) and its variants (apodeixis, epideixis, endeixis, etc.), phaneros and phainomai (visible) and their variants (kataphanēs, apophainō, etc.), and martus (witness) and its variants. Chapter3 considers the language of display and witnessing, where speakers seek to prove their case by describing what has been shown and seen by witnesses, or where they demand witnesses to prove what has been asserted. “How else,” says Antiphon in On the Chorus Boy, “can I make true things trustworthy” except through the consistent affirmation of witnesses who were present? (Antiphon 6.29). This section is valuable for bringing into focus the centrality of visibility and sight to notions of truth, a factor that can easily be lost in translations. Thus, the speaker of On the Chorus Boy emphasizes not only that he was appointed a counselor and entered the council-house as such, but that he was seen (horōntes) and was visible (phaneros) doing so. O’Connell does not claim, but he enables one to conclude, that the infamous dichotomy between truth and probability in rhetorical theory typically devolves into these two kinds of seeing: what has been witnessed (and is therefore true) and what the situation “looks like” to the audience (and must be probable).Included here is a section on medical and philosophical interest in the visible as an epistemological link to the invisible. O’Connell quotes Anaxoagoras’ maxim, “Visible things are the face of things which are unclear” (101). This could lead to a discussion of the complex and rhetorically important doctrine of signs as tools of rhetorical argument. Instead, O’Connell moves on in chapter four to discuss how speakers use the language of visibility and demonstration to describe arguments. This, argues O’Connell, places jurors into the position of virtual witnesses themselves of something publicly known, as it was known that some grain dealers had been changing their prices over the course of a day (Lysias 22, Against the Grain Dealers). Or they are witnesses of arguments as demonstrations (epideixō). Speakers contrast what the opponent simply says (legei) with what the speaker will “demonstrate in an evident manner” (110). The language of display is thus used to differentiate mere telling from showing. This reference to visual metaphors for the persuasive effects of argument suggests a larger connection with rhetorical argument generally and the role of vision therein.Third, we can attend to imagination as internal sight, or what O’Connell calls “shared spectatorship,” when speakers “try to make the jurors visualize their version of events and accept it as true” (123). This includes a discussion of techniques of vivid description like enargeia, hyptyposis, or ekphrasis via detailed description. O’Connell looks specifically at described scenes of civic suffering, as when Lycurgus describes the panic after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea. Shared spectatorship can also occur through the construction of “internal audiences—characters in a narrative who witness what is being described and whose reaction can function as a prompt and model for the jury, as when, in the speech Against Diogeiton (Lysias 32), the speaker recounts Diogeiton’s daughter speaking to the family about her father’s embezzlement and lying (150). Visualization can also be heightened through deictic pointing to the persons in court whose actions or suffering is being described, fusing what is physically seen (demonstratio ad oculo) with what is imagined (deixis ad phantasma): “this man here they seized and tied to the pillar” (Lysias fr. 279, 155). This takes us back to the beginning, which addressed seeing in performance space itself. This last section was for me the most interesting and informative, and it seemed the most widely applicable to forensic, and indeed all genres of oratory. Here too, I saw connections to a basic category of rhetorical discourse: narrative and narrative theory, to notions of realism and verisimilitude, to the conjuring of story worlds and the work of narrative inference.Certainly, anyone interested in visual and spatial rhetorics, bodily rhetoric, performance, and related topics will want to be familiar with O’Connell’s work. I found much to admire in every chapter, and more so as the book advanced to later sections and chapters. At the same time, in each section I found myself thinking about some clear and relevant connections to fundamentals of rhetorical theory—theories of probability and signs, of argument and narrative—that the work brushed up against but did not explore. Of course, O’Connell writes as a classicist, not a rhetorician, and we cannot expect any work to follow up every thread that it pulls on, particularly those outside the author’s bailiwick. So, we might rather say that this work promises to amply repay the attention of scholars of rhetorical history and theory for its insights into the operation of sight and seeing—physical, lexical, and imaginary—in Attic forensic speeches.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2019.1569423
  2. Rhetorical Mimesis and the Mitigation of Early Christian Conflicts by Brad McAdon
    Abstract

    Reviews 87 igual forma cabida las voces que explican los llamados ejercicios de acompaña­ miento u apoyo: la lectura, la audición y la paráfrasis, así como los de perfec­ cionamiento, como la elaboración y la réplica. Hasta aquí, nada que objetar; sin embargo, sorprende un poco la inclusión de la mayoría de los términos restantes, no tanto porque no sean pertinentes o porque carezcan de solidez expositiva, sino porque uno comienza a preguntarse por las discriminazioni y a pensar que la cifra de treinta y nueve lemas resulta más arbitraria o, al menos, no plenamente sustentada de lo que debería ser un glosario razonado. La nítida distinción que hay en los términos glosados cuando de los propios ejercicios se trata, se torna confusa cuando de la elección del aparato termino­ lógico que debe cubrir una obra de esta naturaleza depende. Berardi tiene en su descargo, como él mismo reconoce, la dificultad que supone establecer una premisa metodológica que explique el sentido y los límites de un glosario como el que nos presenta. La obra cuenta con quince esquemas que facilitan la confrontación y puntos en común de las voces glosadas y que a fines pedagógicos resultan sumamente útiles, de ahí que se echen en falta en la sxypcxaic, la yvóur) y la xpcíoí. Cierran la obra una bibliografía, un índice de autores y otro índice de términos retóricos en griego v en latín. En conjunto y, salvo las matizaciones indicadas, el glosario constituye una aportación altamente significativa en el panorama de los estudios de la retórica escolar v un instrumento valioso para el análisis histórico-crítico, literario y contextual de la literatura clásica. Rodolfo González Equihua Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Brad McAdon, Rhetorical Mimesis and the Mitigation of Early Christian Conflicts, Eugene Oregon, Pickwick Publications, 2018. 333 pp. ISBN: 9781532637728 Some of the best current work in historical rhetorical criticism is being done in religious studies, particularly of the New Testament. Duane Watson's The Rhetoric of the New Testament: A Bibliographic Survey (2006) lists hun­ dreds of works; scholars who identify with disciplinary rhetoric constitute a small fraction of the authors Watson lists. Brad McAdon s Rhetorical Mimesis and the Mitigation of Early Christian Conflicts makes a worthy addi­ tion by a rhetoric scholar to this work. The "conflicts" of the book's title refer to differing views concerning events around Jesus' birth and his relationship to his family in the gospels and to friction between the Pauline and Petrine communities over circumci­ sion in the Epistle to the Galatians and in the Acts of the Apostles. McAdon argues that the gospel writers and the author of Acts mediated these conflicts through rhetorical mimesis that the authors resolved the issues or obscured the disagreements through the creation of new texts based on 88 RHETORICA imitated source texts. While I have reservations about McAdon's method and some of his conclusions, I admire this book for its erudition and for the clarity and strength of its argument. After an Introduction summarizing each chapter, McAdon turns in chapter 2 to the roles that imitation played in Greece and Rome from the 5th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. The pervasiveness of imitation, espe­ cially Roman imitation of Greek sources, has been studied by Classicists in the context of intertextuality. Within rhetoric, imitation's locale was the classroom. As McAdon effectively summarizes, "mimesis/imitation was the means by which students were taught to read, write, critically analyze a text, and prepare a speech" (244). Drawing on the detailed analysis of G. N. Knauer, he concludes this chapter by analyzing the relationships between Virgil's Aeneid and its Homeric sources, a relationship that for him parallels the relationship between the New Testament writers and their sources. In chapters three, four and five, McAdon focuses on the literary relations­ hips between the three Synoptic Gospels. Scholarly consensus is that Mark's was written first, followed by Matthew's, then Luke's. There is also wide agreement (though...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0031
  3. Selfe & Ulman, “Black Narratives Matter: Pairing Service-Learning with Archival Research”
  4. Frameworks for Collaboration
    Abstract

    Rhetoric and composition scholars have recently called our attention to the value of archival research in the undergraduate classroom, leading to rich collaborations with archivists and librarians at many institutions. As we engaged our own pedagogical collaboration as a university archivist and English faculty member, we realized that, though we might use slightly different language to articulate them or cite different sources in support of them, many of our learning goals overlapped. As we explored these goals together, we realized that they evidenced a correspondence in our disciplines that we had not explored—one that is reflected in our fields’ recent outcomes statements: the 2011 Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and 2016 Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. In this article, we briefly describe our course and use it as a touch point for comparing these disciplinary statements. We argue that analysis of the overlap between these two documents helps us articulate a new set of reasons for faculty to connect with their allies in libraries and archives to teach undergraduate research and writing.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-7173856

2019

  1. Claiming an Education: Using Archival Research to Build a Community of Practice
    Abstract

    This article explores how archival research can be used in staff education courses to work toward what Ann Ellen Geller et al. call a “community of practice”: a writing center culture that emphasizes constant, continual, and recursive thinking and learning among directors and consultants. Offering voices of tutors and directors captured in a three-year study of an archival project, the authors maintain that this kind of research offers several gifts, as it cultivates flexible conferencing practices, dismantles hierarchies, and establishes a cross-generational community. To help writing center directors and assistants incorporate such research into their own center, this article concludes with assignment instructions, tips for archival research, and suggestions for building a writing center archive

  2. Undergirding Writing Centers’ Responses to the Neoliberal Academy
    Abstract

    Writing centers are at once a part ofand a response tothe neoliberal academy, a phenomenon that Ryan King-White describes as a place where, “students have come to be regarded as customers, academic researchers are thought of as entrepreneurs competing for external grant funding, and the university itself more closely resembles a business model than an institute of higher learning” (223). Using that as a starting point, this essay functions part historiography, part diagnosis, and part synthesis, with three main goals: (1) redefine “neoliberalism” as a framework of critique for contemporary higher education within the United States, (2) diagnose writing centers situatedness within the neoliberal academy, and finally, (3) identify how emergent social justice scholarship—here defined as those theories accounting for access and ability, anti-racism, braver space, mindfulness, and labor—within Writing Center Studies are particularly suited as responses to neoliberalism. By expanding disciplinary praxes to examine how writing centers function within the neoliberal academy to incorporate a broader range of identities, theories, and people, writing centers can be better equipped to identify the reifying practices of our centers and develop ways to resist the harmful effects of neoliberalism that evoke these responses.

  3. Layered Feminist Historiography: Composing Multivocal Stories Through Material Annotation Practices
  4. Review of Cheryl Glenn and Roxanne Mountford’s Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century: Historiography, Pedagogy, and Politics

September 2018

  1. Driving the Three-Horse Team of Government: Kairos in FDR’s Judiciary Fireside Chat
    Abstract

    Abstract In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal hung on the whims of a deeply divided Supreme Court. His ninth fireside chat argued for legislation that would grant FDR enough new justices to shift the Court in favor of the New Deal. Facing entrenched opposition to his unpopular plan, Roosevelt presented the president as a constitutional authority who must act in response to the crisis of the Great Depression to drive the three-horse team of government toward recovery. Throughout the text, Roosevelt worked to create a sense of urgency and asked the nation to see this moment as the time for decisive action. This study examines the flow of kairos in the speech, tracing timeliness in Roosevelt’s argument for swift action targeting the Court to safeguard economic recovery. Although Roosevelt did not expand the Court, his language lives on as a model for subsequent executives and part of our public constitutional discourse.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0481

May 2018

  1. Arguing Over Texts: The Rhetoric of Interpretation
    Abstract

    The University of Oxford Press has recently published two books on rhetoric, Michel Meyer’s (Chaïm Perelman’s successor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles) What is Rhetoric and Martin Camper’s Arguing Over Texts. Meyer and Camper build from the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and rhetoricians to develop the role of questions in rhetoric (Meyer) and stasis theory (Camper). That both books, published by one of the leading academic presses in the world, feature a recovery and a modern renovation of the rhetorical tradition marks a potentially exciting moment in the contemporary history of rhetoric. Camper’s book is but one of several illustrations of a renaissance in rhetorical history. Camper follows the line of argument set forth by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbechts-Tyteca in their New Rhetoric Project and Douglas Walton in his “new dialectic.” They chronicle the origins, development, and fall of an ancient rhetorical concept and then engage in its restoration. Similarly, Martin Camper tells the history of the origins, development, and fall of stasis theory, creating as a result a compelling exigence for a “systematically, theoretically grounded method for understanding and analyzing patterns of interpretative disputes and how those disputes are resolved” (3).Camper has developed a new interpretative stasis that complements the new rhetoric and dialectic. He has, with success, revived “ancient rhetorical theory to think about and solve modern problems” (3). Toward this end, he has offered scholars of rhetoric a gift: a modern method of “understanding and analyzing patterns of interpretative disputes” (3). Camper has read the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians with care, calling on select passages from Aristotle, Cicero, Hermagoras, Quintilian, and other Greek and Roman rhetoricians to ground his new interpretive stases. Because the rhetorical problems humans face recur, as do rhetorical situations, the theoretical insights Camper draws from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Hermagoras of Temnos’s On Stases: A Manual for Declamation, Cicero’s De Inventione, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Quintilian’s The Orator’s Education on stasis theory are strikingly relevant and helpful in the twenty-first century. Camper acknowledges the excellent work done by Fahnestock, Secor, and other modern scholars on stasis theory, building out of their contributions a truly novel system of six interpretative stases: AmbiguityDefinitionLetter versus spiritConflicting passagesAssimilationJurisdictionCamper’s illustrations of these interpretative stases are wide ranging, including a controversy involving climate-change scientists and the claim they had used deceitful practices; a truly insightful analysis of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, which provoked significant controversy during Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency; the Supreme Court ruling on gun control in District of Columbia v. Heller; a consideration of Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and others. His use of the interpretative stases introduced in Arguing Over Text to analyze critically passages from the Hebrew and Christian sacred texts stand out as exceptionally cogent. Camper’s new interpretative stases allow for sensitive and astute readings of these sacred texts, fulfilling his promise to provide a model of interpretative stases that effectively joins hermeneutics with rhetoric.Camper devotes chapters five and eight to an explanation of how his interpretative stases work using an extended illustration drawn from the Christian Bible. Passages from I Corinthians and II Timothy, Camper notes, are deployed by some within the Christian faith community to justify prohibitions against women preaching and speaking in church. Camper considers the outbreak of arguments between and among Christians about the meaning of these and other passages and explains how the stases of jurisdiction, ambiguity, definition, letter versus spirit, conflicting passages, and assimilation can be used to explain the interpretative disagreements. These interpretative stases “are ordered, with disagreements moving from jurisdiction, to ambiguity, and then definition, and finally to either letter versus spirit, conflicting passages, or assimilation” (165). The dispute within the Christian faith community over the role of women preaching and speaking in church is better understood as a result of Camper’s application of these ordered interpretative stases.Camper has a strong command of Christian theology and sacred texts, which allows him to trace with expertise the trajectories of the arguments. The arguments about women preaching and speaking in church he considers are those expressed by committed Christians who share a commitment to the authority of the Bible. Yet, because the passages in the Bible addressing the topic of women preaching and speaking elicit different interpretations in the Christian faith community, Camper’s stases constitute a taxonomy that describes and explains, but does not seek to judge, the disagreement. As Camper explains, the dispute takes place primarily within the “letter versus spirit,” “conflicting passages,” and “assimilation” interpretative stases.That members of the same faith tradition draw different interpretations from a shared sacred text underscores Camper’s wisdom in his claim that ambiguity “is the archetypal interpretative issue that readers face when they encounter a text: How does one decide between two or more competing readings of the same passage?” (16). The background, experience, and aspirations of those who interpret sacred scripture will significantly influence how the Christian Bible is understood, a point Camper develops. Humans will disagree about textual interpretations, even those with shared values and common texts, because they approach a communal text from different experiences and backgrounds to fetch out meaning of the same passage. There is, as a result, an essential and even a foundational ambiguity at the core of most sacred texts including the Bible and secular texts, like the US Constitution.Fortunately, Camper resist the temptation to view ambiguity as the ruling feature of textual interpretation. His interpretative stases can help those who must make judgments about conflicting interpretations of textual passages. Using the “letter versus spirit,” “conflicting passages,” and “assimilation” stases, the reader draws the conclusion from Camper’s neutral assessment of the arguments that the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians and II Timothy did not intend a full-scale prohibition of women preaching and speaking in church, that the spirit of Paul’s message on women is inconsistent with the particular passages cited by those who support a prohibition based on his words, and that there are passages in Paul’s letters that contradict and qualify the prohibitions found in I Corinthians and II Timothy.Camper stays true to his promise that he is “not interested in how one might arrive at a valid reading of a text … and does not offer a method for doing so” (11). The interpretative stases he offers are not “designed to offer a theory of proper reading practices,” and he provides “no normative judgments about the validity of any of the interpretations or supporting arguments offered in this book” (11). In Arguing Over Texts, Camper informs his reader that his book purposefully “sidesteps questions of valid interpretations” (11). While it is important to step back and sidestep questions of valid interpretations to understand how interpretative stases work, if Camper’s new interpretative stasis theory is to evolve beyond the goal of describing interpretative disagreements, it will need to step directly into questions of valid interpretations, normative standards, and issues of justice. To this end, the next step in the study of interpretative stases might be for Camper and other scholars of rhetoric to pair the wisdom of the ancients on stasis theory with contemporary research on argument and decision making. This might involve the research of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber on argumentation and reason, Daniel Kahneman and Paul Slovic on system-one and -two thinking, and Robin Gregory on structured decision making. This research provides insights on valid readings of texts, reaching normative judgments, and joining values to action. Regardless, Camper’s new interpretative stasis theory constitutes an important recovery and renovation of a key rhetorical concept.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1474054

April 2018

  1. Introduction
    Abstract

    The introduction explores some of the reasons that teaching Landon’s poetry has historically posed difficulties for scholars seeking to present Landon to students and shows how these very difficulties can help teachers confront myriad interesting questions in the classroom, including periodicity, the recovery of women’s writing, affect, narratives of influence, lyricism, and such topics as globalism, through five innovative approaches to her work.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-4359085

March 2018

  1. Disability Rhetoric by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and: Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters
    Abstract

    Reviews Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454 Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN9781611173833 Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's defi­ nition of rhetoric. In early translations it appears as a faculty, following the European vernaculars and the Latin translation of Aristotle's dunamis with facultas. Yet even if this translation flattens the complex significance of Aristotle's original sense, it happily brings us within the orbit of pressing problems in our own moment. We may now pose new questions: If rhetoric insists it be thought of as an ability, how might we inflect this idée reçue of the field by thinking through the meaning of rhetoric from a position of disability? This is not a matter of simple inversion. Disability is not the opposite of ability but the suspension of the assumptions of ableism. In this sense, it is like disbelief. We say we are in a 'state of disbelief' precisely when we are presented with incontrovertible evidence that commands assent. Disability rhetoric, then, seeks to illuminate the unreflective assump­ tions and heuristics that we commonly use to make judgments concerning the conditions and abilities of others. In Disability Rhetoric and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, Jay Timothy Dolmage and Shannon Walters offer book-length elaborations of what such a rhetoric might be. The authors do not simply challenge rhetoric about disability or examine disability advocacy rhetorically, although both these aims are crucial to their projects. The authors argue that a thoroughgoing criticism of ableism requires a reexamination of rhetorical history and theory. The classical tradition's inability to think through bodily difference made it narrower than it otherwise might have been. Quintilian asserted that the limits of rhetorical education could be found in the body of the orator, "for assuredly no one can exhibit proper delivery if he lacks a memory for retaining what he has written or ready facility in uttering what he has to speak extempore, or if he has any incurable defect of utterance." Any such "extraordinary deformity of body ... cannot be remedied by any effort of art" (11.3.10). Unable to think of bodily difference as anything but deformity gave ancient rhetorical theory a Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 2, pp. 205-215. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205. 206 RHETORIC A false sense of order and precision, erected upon the assumption that audience and orator could be treated as positions within a discourse rather than approa­ ched within the complexity of situated and contested embodiment. These books can be taken as complementary projects. Dolmage wishes to extend and reinterpret the repertoire and vocabulary of critical rhetoric. Walters focuses on the inventional strategies of disabled persons and their circles. This is not to say that Dolmage neglects invention or Walters criti­ cism. Disability rhetoric shows the imbrication of criticism and invention, since both rely upon practices of sensitization. We might extract six maxims to serve as guideposts for furthering this critical-inventive program. 1. Modes of communication require invention and shape meaning. The con­ stitution of communication between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in the now famous story of their experience at the water pump (Sullivan hand­ spelling 'water' in Keller's palm after running water over her hand, marked by Keller as her entry into language) resulted from a pragmatic awareness of possible channels of meaning-making. Walters argues that many of these possibilities reside within touch and her book serves in part as a collection of examples showing the variety and power of haptic communication. Perhaps even more importantly, a disability rhetoric would attend to the way in which the mode of communication constitutes and affects the meaning of the communication. Rather than appealing to the sensus communis...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2018.0019

February 2018

  1. Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication
    Abstract

    As we so often trip about and lose our breath over speaking precisely to “what is rhetoric(al)?,” it should come to no surprise that being asked what we want of rhetoric, of language, of an other (in language) moves us to fidget, even brings us to blush. But if we pause with these questions, lips parted without yet the words to answer, we may notice a peculiar craving that churns before the naming. We want of rhetoric—but what? We are compelled toward rhetoric—whereto? We seek in rhetoric—for? If this desire, what Hannah Arendt calls an appetite for love for its own sake, refers to the will to “have and to hold,” our love in/for/through rhetoric always seems to slip from capture. So much so that after a whirl of scholarship that attempts to wed or to divorce rhetoric from a definitive purpose, from its technē, we must now let the lids of our eyes fold into a softer gaze. What do we want of rhetoric? At last, it spills over: “I want you to be.”1We are invited into this vulnerability, to voice such a confession, in Mari Lee Mifsud's Rhetoric of the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication. This book—itself a living form of rhetorical gift/giving—in some way revisits very traditional themes of the ethics and sociality of communication and does so within the canonically sanctioned context of classical antiquity. That said, it possesses a far more adventurous spirit than do missionary readings of Aristotle's Rhetoric. For Mifsud, the possibilities of gift/giving in communication spread beyond exchange and art; she explores rhetoric's gift/giving as “prior to and in excess of art, not as some rudimentary system of relating that awaits systematic and philosophical development, but as some thing, some event, some movement, other than art, other than technē, incommensurable even, meaning outside the system of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures, meaning other than signification, other than symbols, yet always already within and functioning” (3–4). In these first pages, Mifsud gently loosens rhetoric from the grip of its application. Should we not want it for our own desired ends, should we let it move, rhetoric in/as/through gift/giving gives back to us new ways of thinking about communication as in and outside of word exchange, both stirring inside and brimming over technē.Among the multiple gifts/givens that “rhetoric of and as gift” offers is that it frees us to openly explore the relationship between language and love, two creatures who have long been twisted together in the corner. Love in/for/through rhetoric is spoken just above a whisper by Mifsud (such secrecy may be well matched to the ethereal relationship she draws between rhetoric and the gift). “What Aristotle himself called happiness, Cixous, jouissance, Schrag, love, Spivak, care, and Johnstone, freedom” is draped by her more explicit elaboration of “giving rhetoric” as poiesis, creative and generative practice (11). In this vein, Mifsud gathers her chapters around three interlaced topics: 1) creative rather than technical critical orientation; 2) the gift's sacrifice for/by communication; and 3) gift/giving rhetoric as relationality that makes way for the polis. She takes up these topics through an examination of Homeric gift/givens in Aristotle's Rhetoric that have up to this point been a hushed dimension of the field's work. In so doing, Mifsud both explains (in excess) and performs (poetic) rhetoric of and as gift, giving way to a “creative consciousness, capable of what Cixous calls “Other-love” (148). In short, Mifsud's articulations of the “and” that dwells between “rhetoric and the gift” allows us as critics and citizens to imagine and practice love in language by letting whatever is other be.An aside dedicated to (the technē of) exorida, the (art of) beginning, and a moment for reaching shared understanding: it would both betray and misrepresent Mifsud's insights to here tidily align each chapter with creative historiography, sacrifice, and givens in the polis. As she is committed to letting the poetic emerge and exhibit, Mifsud's footing in her project is not steady, and the reader swerves behind her shifts. Therefore, this review wanders more thematically than chronologically. It slides amid subjects, and it invites further wandering. Yes, the task of “review” remains at hand, however the occasion calls, too, for embracing logos as “a gathering,” an “invitation to you to see what you might see, to be free, … to imagine all the more to be imagined” (55). Echoing what is familiar but doing so in a way that allows what is being said to nonetheless be experienced as new is, after all, the function of Homeric poiesis.2Mifsud continuously pronounces distinctions between creative and technical orientations, between Homeric and technical rhetoric, and so tempts her readers to believe that there must be some contest between rhetoric that is contained and rhetoric that is allowed to be in excess; however, she is very clear throughout her book that poiesis is not anti-technē. That is, poetic gifts/givens pulsate in carefully composed expressions and, at the same time, exceed them. Her traversing of these planes, as she all the while welcomes any surprise that comes from their movements, indicates a creative rather than technical orientation toward thought, language, and other, fully appreciating the gift rather than reflexively tucking it behind organization and argumentation. This is not to say that operating from a technical orientation erases the poetic; it simply emphasizes a means-to-an-end approach at the expense of letting the poetic come into view. As Mifsud puts it, technical thinking/writing/acting entails “an exacting efficiency to achieve the end of reason” without yielding to its excess (19).Mifsud articulates this difference in the first chapter through a focused comparison of how Homer and Aristotle have been historicized as rhetorical figures. Here she takes issue with technical historiographical interpretations of Homer, which depict him as “being a poet with a run-on style” and lacking rationality. Technical language reveals “a complex mind capable of abstract and critical thinking,” and thus Homer is seen as “primitive” (20). The technical historiographic interpretations of Homer are not just considered “technical” because of their emphasis on technē (for Homer's so-called failure to contribute a technē of rhetoric may be attributed to the mistake of counting him among rhetoricians to begin with) but because they measure Homer against Aristotle's view of rhetoric, certain defined preconditions for the rhetorical, and the particular demands of the polis. That is, evaluations of Homer on these grounds affirm the authority of Rhetoric and position Homer as the negative, the other whose form can only be traced recognized when aligned with what forms of rhetoric are presumed proper (21–22). Mifsud asks what an affirmative attitude toward Homer would offer to rhetoric: reconsidering Homeric gifts/giving and their relationship to language and being blends and blurs the borders of rhetoric solidified by technē, fixations on the logical, the figurative, and the representative (25–26). She spends the remaining chapters of the book performing a “creative historiographic” approach for the purposes of exploring how Homer contributes otherwise to our understanding of rhetoric. Put differently (here she borrows from Deleuze), Mifsud seeks to “deterritorialize” what we know of rhetoric, all the while appreciating that ultimately rhetoric will be “reterritorialized” by way of technē (28). “Such a creative orientation toward history and theory writing allows for rhetoric, in acknowledgment and performance of the gift, to offer a return to itself to and in excess of exchange” (30).Commitment to a creative orientation to the rhetorical calls for giving (in)to the excess of language and yielding to the multiple experiences a poetic rhetorical act makes possible; such an orientation immediately transforms the relationship the rhetor has with words, who is no longer bound up by purpose or utilization but allowed to roam. It also transforms the rhetor's relationship with the addressee for whom the words were uttered. Poiesis puts to bed any expectations that a message or meaning is transmitted or even merely “understood;” instead, language (and the other sharing in it) enjoys the loving liberty that comes from being let to be. Mifsud describes this “hospitable” rhetor in Deleuzian terms as no longer an author but a production studio undergoing wholly creative labor without method or rules (146). And, for hospitality's sake, the giving rhetor/rhetoric as gift must demand some sacrifice. Sacrifice “informs the gift and is an effect of the gift. To give requires sacrifice of some sort, for to give is to give away, to let go” (95). A creative relationship to rhetoric requires a radical openness to/with language, as it requires letting the other pull from our words whatever he or she sees in the expression without the rhetor burdening him or her with what it really means, and thus Homer is the personification of this giving.Specifically, Homer plays host to Aristotle. Homer is referred to and relied on throughout the Rhetoric, but he is not exactly paid homage (95, 100). Sacrifice explicitly requires the giving away of goods hard to come by and a giving away of self—Aristotle sacrifices Homer by “circulat[ing] only the thinnest slivers of Homeric doxa,” compressing vivid scenes from his epics into “sound bites” that fit the defined purpose of rhetorical technē (96), and by sacrificing the “poet” himself to “the new signification of rhetor, more in line with the norms and needs of classical technē” (100). Mifsud is very clear that Aristotle's sacrifice of Homer, Homeric givens, and poiesis “should not be considered an abuse of Homer. Homeric hospitality is unconcerned with exploitation by the one in receipt of its gift, and by virtue of poiesis, even though the poetic is reduced by Aristotle to prose more fitting for the technical, “we have no ‘true’ Homer' … to recover” (96). Homer, agnostic toward himself and his creation, makes his offerings without acknowledgment as such or obligation to reciprocate or to receive in any so-called appropriate manner (the sort of offering Aristotle names kharis in his Rhetoric). Aristotle's appropriation of Homer marks the taking place of giving rhetoric, and just as Homer's epics inhabit Aristotle's Rhetoric (however subtly), just as poiesis sighs between technē's articulations, the gift/giving gives rise to and nurtures the rhetorical.Nonetheless Mifsud remarks that our memory of rhetoric's foundations in the gift/giving has faded. Its appearance has been stamped over repeatedly by “procedural operation” and “technical knowledge,” even in the polis, the place where men supposedly show themselves for who they truly are (103). At this point, after insisting for over one hundred pages that poiesis has never really abandoned rhetoric, even if it just faintly glows in the face of technē, Mifsud mourns poiesis as if it has been lost, given away to the “service of technē.” Its dissolution in our interactions with others is tragic: “Things and people in a polis culture are related through distant, abstract mechanisms of power rather than personal relations, through technical proceduralism and utility more so than through hospitality and honor.” The forfeiting of the poetic to the technical not only restrains creativity capacity and limits our access to worlds yet known through language but also transforms communication from a medium through which we come to know and love the other into a barrier wedged between the self and other (103).With the erosion of rhetoric as gift/giving by “end-driven goals,” the other does not appear at all except as a commodity, one whom the rhetor seeks to win over, to persuade, to possess as a means to securing the rhetor's own ambitions and aims. In sum, rhetoric drained of the poetic, rhetoric made into merely “a technical apparatus to secure judgment,” is rhetoric drained of its ethical and genuinely political dimension (104). This dramatic warning against forgetting Homer raises some crucial questions about the polis in the midst of the field's ongoing romanticization of civic discourse, democracy, and justice. Mifsud grants that these matters are indeed worthy of attention but maintains that they neither can nor should dictate rhetoric's expanse (104). It would be fair to say that Mifsud does not ask that we abandon our idealistic vision of the polis but to embrace it more tightly, and forging such intimacy, she suggests, is possible only by recognizing the limits of technē and reaching into its excess, where the poetic lies in waiting.In the latter portion of her book, Mifsud is most lucid about the stakes of her appeals to recover rhetorical gift/giving. When the rhetorical is curbed by a sought-after result, when the other is not to be seen or acknowledged through rhetoric but possessed by it for the purpose of policy, allegiance, lawfulness, equality, and so forth, the ethical and political relations made possible in and through language are compromised. It is beside the point that these purposes may be valuable or good; “possession” is the operative phrase: renouncing Homeric poiesis directs our visions and capacities only toward a “particular order of things” at the expense of recognition of the other qua other and at the expense of recognizing language as such.3 It feels as though Mifsud is calling for rhetoricians to reclaim the poetic in order to remember rhetoric's origins in the gift, thereby radically rethinking what sort of inquiry rhetoric should take up and how we engage in our questions together through the written and spoken word. Do we revitalize the subject of style? Are we now obliged to open our understanding of publics in a way that intimates rhetoric gift/giving? Maybe. Whatever instruction Mifsud leaves to her reader is confused by her compulsory bow to Derrida's critique of gift giving (127, 139–43, 161). “The archaic Homeric gift economy is not our savior,” she assures (143).But if the rhetorical is concerned with the question of language and (love of) the other, why not heed Homer's example as host? Mifsud's most compelling contribution is a critique of the ways we indefinitely affix argument, persuasion, policy, and democracy to rhetoric's art; or, put differently, the ways in which we have only asked after how language can serve our self-determined appearances or preconceived designs and purposes. The gift/giving rhetoric requests at last (as it always has) to let the question of language—language as a question—surface, to let it shimmer in the expression of the other, to let it ring in the other's voice. True, this is a matter of love. Never mind that gifts may implicate language or the other in a reciprocal exchange. Should we be wary to let language in turn give voice? Through this thesis we approach a Levinasian dream, whereby the other finds himself in (the other's) expression, and the other is recognized in an intimate state, already giving of herself. This is not obligation so much as a joining, a touching and being touched. Mifsud is thus too humble in her final appeals: the spectacular transformation of our relationship to language that Rhetoric and the Gift performs—throwing back into question what we know/that we have ever actually known/whether we can ever know rhetoric's potential—is the necessary beginning of loving an other and of loving the world.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.51.1.0091

January 2018

  1. Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters
    Abstract

    Shannon Walters’ Rhetorical Touch stretches the consideration of embodied rhetorics to embrace the sense of touch through both classical rhetoric and contemporary disability studies. Key to Walters’ project is a rereading of Aristotle’s pisteis—logos, pathos, and ethos—through the sense of touch. To examine the productions of a variety of disabled rhetors, she draws upon rhetoricians from Empedocles to Burke, on phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and on disability-studies scholars such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. This broad, disciplinary-crossing quality of her scholarship makes sense because she situates touch as “a sense that transcends bodily boundaries; it demands an approach that also transcends boundaries” (8). Though her project is solidly within the realm of disability studies, it can and should affect how we do scholarship in rhetoric.Through an understanding of Empedocles’ sense of logos, Walters argues that touch is the broadest means of persuasion, and, furthermore, that it is the sense that ties all humans together, those who are disabled as well as those who are temporarily able-bodied. In so doing, Walters calls for a radical repositioning of all rhetorical appeals as fundamentally rooted in the sense of touch. This is the most radical and fascinating claim of the book, and it holds up for both individual rhetors as well as amorphous rhetors who are harder to identify. Walters not only uses this understanding of rhetoric to guide examination of Helen Keller, Temple Grandin, and Nancy Mairs, but also in her examination of the birth of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s through the 1977 demonstrations for the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. At times, her broad historical and theoretical approach weaves together unevenly, but the overarching argument’s contribution to reimagining pisteis is solid and perhaps even groundbreaking.The first chapter examines the tactile experience of Helen Keller’s rhetorical productions through a careful consideration of her texts, the context in which they were produced, and the theoretical implications of her practice. A facet of this chapter that I found particularly relevant and insightful was Walter’s examination of the doubt of authenticity and individual authorship that accompanied all of Keller’s writings. Walters reads the accusations of plagiarism against Keller as stemming directly from Keller’s relationship to communication as tactile and inherently collaborative. Though Keller is an exceptional example of these facets of rhetorical production, we all draw on sources we have absorbed unknowingly, on collaboration with present and distant others, and on a tactile experience. Walters argues we thus must reshape rhetoric to account for this dynamic. To do so, she literally redraws the traditional rhetorical triangle into a doubled triangle, forming either a diamond with an entire side “touching,” representing both traditional ethos and her reinterpretation through mêtis, or an angular and precarious hourglass, intersecting at the point of two interpretations of logos—Aristotle’s and Empedocles’.Chapter two examines the demonstrations by disability activists demanding enforcement of Section 504, simultaneously continuing Walters’ theoretical underpinnings, which rest on an understanding of rhetorical identification largely dependent on Burke, but shaped through theories of touch by Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and Deleuze. Walters identifies a key problem with rhetorical models of identification: they “do not accommodate the identities of people with disabilities or identifications made possible by the lived experience of disability” (62). Walters’ retheorization seeks to accommodate identification: “Specifically, identification via sensation and touch possesses the potential to reform and reshape the process of identification” (64). Walters suggests Deleuze’s concept of the “fold” as a model of Burkean identification that includes division. Though I find this chapter fascinating and ambitious, I’m left wondering why we must accommodate identification at all. This seems a retrofitting strategy and potentially less radical than an outright dismissal, or even a redefinition, as Walters does so well in her reimagining of pisteis.In the next three chapters, Walters molds the rhetorical triangle into something radically different from what our first-year composition textbooks taught us in order to be inclusive of touch and thus of disabled rhetors. Instead of Aristotle’s autonomous, rational logos, in chapter three, Walters puts forward Empedocles’ felt sense of logos, which is touch-based and enables a facilitated model of rhetoric. She finds this extralinguistic approach to logos more appropriate for rhetors with psychological disabilities and suggests that, “Empedocles’ sense of logos, felt in the heart as much as exhibited by one’s cognition, is physical, psychological, and embodied” (98). Walters then applies this reading of felt logos to online support forums for schizophrenia and depression, in which participants explicitly discuss touch and the lack of it in their lives. This reading is innovative, though perhaps limited in this online form.In the following chapter, Walters pushes her readers to reexamine how we presume an ethos that is neurotypical. She suggests, “Simply put, autistic people are seen as ethos-less when viewed through a narrowly medical or pathological lens” (113). This pathological lens casts autists as unable to identify and connect with others and therefore unable to construct ethos. In this chapter, Walters is doing her most expansive work to develop lines of thought already established in considerations of disability and of bodily knowing within our discipline, such as those developed by Debra Hawhee and Jay Dolmage, who both look to mêtis as an alternative knowledge production within rhetoric that is also based in bodily adaptation. Walters builds directly on this scholarship in order to suggest an approach to ethos that is neuro-diverse: “I redefine mêtis as a tactile relationship of embodied cognition between people and their environments that supports a method of character formation not based on traditional notions of ability and neurotypicality” (118). In this chapter, Walters makes a significant contribution to disability rhetoric as a field by showing how mêtis can accommodate those who use facilitated communication as well as those who are neuro-divergent and may use touch in nontypical ways to build trust and character.In the next chapter, Walters articulates how facility with kairos can make new forms of pathos possible: “I redefine kairos though special attention to the sense of touch, showing how kairos operates tactilely to create new emotional and physical connections among bodies in close proximity and contact” (145). Walters uses the term “redefine” in this chapter and the last in ways that may lead a reader to think she has no regard for rhetorical history. Quite to the contrary, Walters is changing perspective and illuminating a connection to touch that has always been related to the terms she is deploying. For instance, Walters notes that in the first uses of the term kairos, in Homer and Hesiod, the term is “nearly synonymous with ‘disability,’ indicating places of bodily vulnerability and impairment that are penetrable tactilely” (153). Here, Walters traces an etymology that classically may have worked to further disadvantage those who are impaired, but that in current rhetorical scholarship can call attention to the tactile and kairotic ways of employing pathos, which disabled rhetors, such as Nancy Mairs, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and John Hockenberry, have opened as rhetorical possibilities.Her final two chapters work to conclude her reexamination of rhetoric through the sense of touch. Chapter six explores the possibilities of teaching with haptic technologies. Far from an afterthought, this chapter remains deeply theoretical, engaged in historiography, and pulls together her shape-shifting pisteis within the classroom. Walters leads the reader as she leads her students through a critical investigation of haptic technologies, showing the ableist assumptions embedded within them. Not only is this investigation pertinent to disability studies, but it also models the kind of deep critical analysis we should all be guiding our students toward. Walters’ conclusion reminds us that we are all embedded in haptic technologies and the future of communication technology will only embed us further. As we critically engage technology, we need a lens through which to understand touch, which Walters has provided.Rhetorical Touch is an important contribution to the historiography of rhetoric, to rhetorical theory, to disability studies, and to composition rhetoric. I look forward to seeing how other scholars take up this reshaping of the traditional rhetorical triangle. The only disappointment I can manage to find in the book is the continued adherence to identification. However, Walters provides analytical insight and new perspectives on the tradition that are radical and inclusive of diverse bodies and minds. That is what this book offers to the world of rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1419747
  2. Mythic Historiography: Refiguring Kenneth Burke’s Deceitful Woman Trope
    Abstract

    Readers of A Rhetoric of Motives often acknowledge Burke’s anti-feminist blind spots, but argue that these blind spots need not negate his larger contributions to rhetorical theory. While true, this claim is also dangerous because it assumes that identifying an argumentative blind spot is tantamount to having worked through all its complexities. This article attempts to work through these complexities via a method of mythic historiography grounded in Burke’s concept of the almost universal. This article demonstrates that Burke organizes his philosophy of modern rhetoric and his concept of identification around a deceitful Woman trope in ways that claim a universality that is actually gendered male. By reimagining the relation of identification and myth in A Rhetoric of Motives this article refigures the deceitful Woman trope in terms of its unassimilability within Burke’s modern philosophy of rhetoric and discusses implications for rhetorical studies.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2017.1278780
  3. Remembering Silence: Bennett College Women and the 1960 Greensboro Student Sit-Ins
    Abstract

    The consensus memory of the 1960 Greensboro student sit-ins suggests that four men were solely responsible for the demonstration. Contrary to that memory is the story of women at Bennett College who began planning the sit-ins in the fall of 1959. This essay uses rhetorics of silence to explore questions about feminist historiography and public memory studies raised by this controversy. In 1960, rather than speaking publicly about their role, Bennett women protected the credibility of the demonstration by taking a position of silence. As time passed, public memories of the event were defined by the four men, and the women’s stories were further suppressed through the processes of commemoration. Studying silence in this context reveals how rhetorical values associated with silence can change over time. Although the Bennett women’s silence began as a temporary tactical choice, their voices were nearly permanently silenced through the processes of commemoration.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1273379

December 2017

  1. Romantic Correspondence as Queer Extracurriculum: The Self-Education for Racial Uplift of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus
    Abstract

    This essay advances same-sex romantic correspondence as a pre-Stonewall site of rhetoric’s queer extra curriculum. Grounded in archival research on African American women Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, I argue their epistolary exchange was animated by queer erotics that enabled their participation in self-education for racial uplift.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201729416

November 2017

  1. And Gladly Teach: The Archival Turn’s Pedagogical Turn
    Abstract

    This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

    doi:10.58680/ce201729373

September 2017

  1. Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation
    Abstract

    In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1385263
  2. Making Visual Rhetoric More Difficult
    Abstract

    In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1385247
  3. Passing Rhetoric’s Kaleidoscope
    Abstract

    In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets three architectonic topoi in motion, charting them across a “range of political, aesthetic, and theological histories” (xiv). O’Gorman gives image, catastrophe, and economy greater presence in different sections of the book, enabling microscopic and macroscopic views of his particular objects of study as well as his ambitious inquiry as a whole. In method as well as conclusions The Iconoclastic Imagination provides a dynamic interplay of rhetorical history, theory, and criticism that together provide an inspiring example of what rhetorical studies—and rhetorical education—fully realized can see, make, and do.1In Part 2, for instance, what O’Gorman describes as “the heart of the book,” he “attend[s] not only to the explicit rhetoric of the texts … but also to subjectivities of spectatorship and the aesthetic logics of the technologies of representation in and against which they are situated” (xv). An example of the kind of profound insight such a method can provide comes two pages into O’Gorman’s conclusion: In the context of Hayek’s and Friedman’s argument that nation-states police economic systems, O’Gorman observes, The state appears as an instrument of necessity, rather than freedom. As such, we have a remarkable reversal of the ancient Greek distinction that Arendt discusses between the polis and the oikos. In the neoliberal version, politics is the space of necessity, and economics is the space of freedom. (199)To highlight the power of O’Gorman’s ideas and methods, I herein juxtapose his superlative study with another recent and worthwhile book that sets out to explicate our contemporary dis-ease.A metaphor O’Gorman uses at the end of chapter 1 pushed from likelihood to necessity my juxtaposition of The Iconoclastic Imagination with the proximately published Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by sociologist Jennifer Carlson. As O’Gorman sums up chapter 1 he observes, “though the age of market triumphalism may or may not be past, I think we remain today in important respects in the crosshairs of a contradiction with respect to the history of liberal democracy” (43). Crosshairs? And how.In Citizen-Protectors, Carlson states that she is “not … attempting to provide a value judgment on guns themselves” (10); nor does her book “attempt to advocate for specific gun policies” (9). Instead, Citizen-Protectorsexamines a world in which guns are a sensible, morally upstanding solution to the problem of crime, a world in which the NRA is not a hard-line lobby that distorts the political process in Washington, D.C., but rather a community service organization that serves middle America, and a world in which guns are attractive not only to white men but also to racial minorities. (9)Carlson’s training as a sociologist enables her to work from inside the norms and practices of men who use guns “to navigate a sense of social precariousness” (10). She analyzes what she first calls the “turn toward guns” and then “the celebration of guns” in terms of “three registers of decline”: First, “changing economic opportunities that have eroded men’s access to secure, stable employment”; second, “abiding fears and anxieties surrounding crime and police inefficacy, concerns that encourage men to embrace their duties as protectors”; and third, “a response to growing feelings of alienation and social isolation, such that guns come to represent not simply an individual’s right to self-defense but also a civic duty to protect one’s family and community” (10) and to police others—hence the book’s title, Citizen-Protectors.Carlson blames neoliberalism for the “age of decline” referenced in her title, and the loss of confidence in the state that Carlson posits harmonizes with O’Gorman’s account of legitimation crisis. Yet Carlson names an additional cause beyond neoliberalism for United States gun mania: what she calls “Mayberry,” “a fictional small North Carolina town on the long-gone Andy Griffith Show” (11). It is here that Carlson’s account becomes deeply unsatisfactory. In her words, “Rich in cultural imagery, Mayberry expresses a nostalgic longing for a ‘state of mind’ … about a particular version of America”; “Mayberry represents, in the American psyche, an idyllic space of single-family homes, nuclear families, community cohesion, and safety and security” (11). Perhaps sensing the inadequacy of the conceptual work she is asking a television program about a fictive town to do in a work of sociology, Carlson hastens to add that the real-life emergence of Mayberry depended on white flight en masse from American cities to suburbs in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s and a manufacturing-based economy that offered men a breadwinning wage to support the nuclear, single-family household that it idealized. While white middle-class Americans chased the socioeconomic security of the white picket fence, their mass divestment from urban centers helped to further concentrate and isolate poor people of color, who were left behind in American so-called ‘urban ghettos.’” (11)O’Gorman’s profound and novel connection between legitimation crisis and the aesthetics of representation offers a much more comprehensive account of the historical and cultural factors that prompt celebration of not only gun culture but other cultures of violence in the United States. What sums up the neoliberal imaginary better than the celebrated—and globally marketed—figure of the American sniper?Perhaps my preference for O’Gorman’s transdisciplinary understanding of neoliberalism and its entailments is merely a consequence of my own pluralist standpoint. While I long ago lamented Plato’s having “put the -ic in rhetoric” by adding the suffix -ike to rhetor (“Plato’s Shibboleth Delineations”), I have come to see that Plato’s ambivalence about rhetorike is—I will take it to be—a gift for rhetorical invention and reinvention. O’Gorman confesses that his study—in his words—“ranges widely”; that suits this free-range rhetorician just fine. To appropriate Luce Irigaray, this rhetoric “which-is-not-one” at its plural heart remains paideia, a teaching art. No better gift to a teacher than for a student to reciprocate and—to use a metaphor which as a non-athlete I have not earned any right to use—raise the bar. By synthesizing rhetoric’s interpretive and productive capacities in a work of unimpeachable scholarship that ends by stressing rhetoric as a teaching art, O’Gorman has, indeed, raised the bar for rhetorical studies.In his postscript, O’Gorman makes a case for, in his words, “a multidisciplinary school for the artificial in all its aspects. This would include a substantive revival of the liberal arts” (210). Nowhere more than in undergraduate rhetoric classrooms, even and especially in the required writing and speaking classes—for all students, not just honors students—can such a revival make a material difference in the quality of our polity. Many thanks to Ned for this book, for his example, and for passing to another generation of rhetorical teacher-scholars the powers of rhetoric’s kaleidoscope, through which we can glimpse in motion ideas across time.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1385254

July 2017

  1. Feminist HistoriographyAs If: Performativity and Representation in Feminist Histories of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    The recently diagnosed “broadening imperative” in revisionary historiography is of special concern to feminist historians, for whom critique of traditional methodological presuppositions has been central to the feminist revisionary project. By examining the performative and figurative elements of feminist historiographical discourse, feminist historians and historiographers can both identify sites of feminist rhetorical resistance to traditional presuppositions, and gain an understanding of how feminist revisionary methodologies have been re-assimilated into traditional methodological and rhetorical paradigms.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1317571

June 2017

  1. Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories by Tarez Samra Graban
    Abstract

    368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0012
  2. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History
    Abstract

    Book Review| June 01 2017 American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. By Jenell Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014; pp. +240. $49.50 cloth; $26.96 paper. Jordynn Jack Jordynn Jack University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 369–376. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0369 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jordynn Jack; American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 369–376. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0369 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 CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0369

May 2017

  1. Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece
    Abstract

    Aristotle's Organon provides an ingeniously systematic way to identify the discrete nature of disciplines that concern human thought and expression. While such an approach helps to understand the unique properties that warrant the recognition of disciplines as discrete, Aristotle's system of classification does not capture well the dynamics, synergy, and symbiotic relationships that appear when disciplines intersect. Perhaps, in fairness to Aristotle, his task was not to explore such relationships, but that does not mean that we should not try to better understand the nature and impact of disciplines such as rhetoric by examining their interplay within the dynamics of social interaction. It is this dynamism of disciplinary interaction that concerns Nathan Crick's Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Specifically, Crick's insightful work concentrates on how power (kratos) serves as the common denominator that grounds all disciplines of human thought and expression in classical Greece. Crick's perspective is shared by earlier scholars of rhetoric. For example, Jeffrey Walker's brilliant 2000 volume Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity helps us to understand that while disciplines may have discrete properties they are nonetheless inextricably bound together in the intersections of human symbolic action. That is, both mimetic and nonmimetic disciplines (e.g., poetry and rhetoric) work together in the social interplay of a culture's activities and, consequently, both their discrete (Aristotelian) properties and their relationship(s) with one another should be the object of study. The significance of Crick's Rhetoric and Power is revealed within the study of such relationships.Crick argues that rhetoric functioned as power in ancient Greece and that this phenomenon explains both the social contributions and the centrality of rhetoric in Hellenic culture. The quest, use, and abuse of power is a controlling force in classical Greece. “What is particularly notable about the Classical Greek inquiry into power,” Crick observes, “is that it always ended up placing power in relationship to speech” (3). From this perspective, the techne or “art” of rhetoric enables the manufacturing of power in human communication. Drawing on such modern thinkers as rhetoricians Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, and Chaïm Perelman, as well as philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Friedrich Nietzsche, Crick explains how this rhetorical capacity has resulting social consequences across all fields of human communication. In short, Crick's work suggests that rhetoric is the art for creating and performing social dramatism through “representative publicity” (242n26).Crick's orientation encourages us to reconceptualize rhetoric by moving away from Aristotelian notions of rhetoric as solely field-dependent casuistry and toward an idea of it as a phenomenon that encompasses all Hellenic disciplines during the classical period. To this end, Rhetoric and Power re-views such dominant aspects of ancient Greece as Homeric, Presocratic, tragic, Sophistic, Isocratean, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. Crick's thorough and systematic treatment of each of these vectors of Greek thought is framed by the relationship between rhetoric, power, and drama. “Rhetoric,” Crick argues, “therefore stands in relationship to power as a facilitator and medium,” and “any discussion of rhetoric must be grounded in a conception of power,” since it is rhetoric that functions as a medium for power through a spectrum of symbolic forms (6, 10). All major forms of art have the capacity to serve as media to perform power; this social dimension of art helps to dramatize the crises, struggles, and issues of the time, and it is through this dramatization that we can both understand and appreciate the scope of rhetoric's influence. For example, this view of rhetoric enables us to see how the Homeric rhapsode's dramatic narrative shaped the paideia of culture through an oral epic. We can see how Presocratic philosophers, dramatists, Sophists, and Plato shifted views of power, representing it as a human capacity rather than the province of gods. Crick also shows—and I believe these are the best points of the book—that the written forms of rhetoric taken on by the historian Thucydides and the educator Isocrates demonstrated a sort of literate power that not only facilitated abstract thought but moved the mentality of Greeks from an oral, tribal perspective to a panhellenic view, transforming the provincial outlook of the civic polis into the more catholic nationalism sought by Alexander. This view of power does not carry with it any inherently negative or cynical connotation. Power, exercised through dramatized rhetoric, can be used as a force for justice; such dramatizations can praise virtue and condemn vice and can provide didactic lessons from history that offer a moral standard and normative corrective.The strength of this volume is Crick's demonstration of how the development of Greek thought and culture is best understood through power. “This effort to transform the nature of power,” Crick observes, “by drawing on rational and mythic resources remains at the core of almost any successful rhetorical endeavor” (41). Homeric discourse served as the medium for maintaining and propagating long-held traditional values, but those values would be challenged. Presocratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, for example, would introduce the notion that mythic views should yield to the newly discovered power of logos (37). The birth of tragedy in the works of dramatists such as Aeschylus would reveal theater as a new medium of power, one where rhetoric literally took the stage to make social commentary, where the “tragic choice” was a rhetorical choice of values. Comedy, as discussed here with the work of Aristophanes, in turn took on an epideictic function; in the form of ridicule and satire, power served as a corrective force exposing (and critiquing) issues for Athenian viewers. Further, as democracy emerges in Athens it becomes apparent that “power will not come from a monarch who monopolizes the tools of violence and forces his subjects to hold their tongue and prostrate themselves before authority; power will come from the free speech of citizens standing on their own feet and deliberating over how to act in concert in pursuit of possibilities” (60).Crick believes that rhetoric finds its “habitation” in situations of struggle that dominate the drama of history, as evidence of these struggles are revealed in Sophistic rhetoric and its Platonic and Isocratean challenges. Crick does an excellent job of showing how Protagoras moved from a notion of logos to a two-logoi oppositional format, advancing the position that power (not merely validity) came through securing agreement between interlocutors by deliberating a continuum of possibilities (e.g., 68). “In effect,” Crick notes, “Protagoras was the first democratic public intellectual who offered citizens a practical metaphysics of political culture which gave them not only rights and responsibilities but also self-understanding rooted in a progressive attitude toward history” (65). This distribution of power explains the popularity and sustained success of the Sophistic movement, the embodiment of which was Gorgias, who awed Athenian spectators with his ability to dramatically perform power. Even in historiography, this vector between rhetor and power becomes evident. Thucydides narrates his history of the Peloponnesian War as a dramatic power struggle, making a conscious effort to apply the sophistic power of logoi (i.e., “set speeches”) to explain human motivation and celebrate human valor (103). Only recently have historians recognized that the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides are best understood in terms of the inherent rhetorical vector of historiography and that the notion of a dispassionate reported chronicling of events fails to capture what these and other historians of their time sought to accomplish by accounting for their moments of struggle. To rhetoricians, the idea that history is rhetorical is obvious, but this is a realization that came to scholars of Greek history only recently. Crick's insights to the ideological manifestations of rhetoric and power in historiography deserves praise (109, 112).Rhetoric and Power compels us to rethink and alter our views of the most important contributors to Greek rhetoric. Crick's treatment of Plato, for example, asks us to include the Protagoras along with our standard readings of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, if we wish to have a more complete understanding of Plato's view of the public intellectual. Crick shows that Plato comes to realize that rhetoric gives a power to philosophy, a power that provides a force of action for civic improvement. In a word, Plato's dramatization of the dialogue Protagoras makes apparent his view “that civic virtue can and must be taught” (154). What the Protagoras does is provide a plan of action that complements the inquiry into the nature and merits of (Sophistic) rhetoric in the Gorgias and the claim in the Phaedrus that rhetoric is at its best when supported by philosophy (162). I also consider this observation to be one of the best contributions of Crick's book.We can likewise appreciate the rhetoric of Isocrates through the lens of Crick's notion of power and drama. The contributions of Isocrates as a literate rhetorician are well established (179). What Crick helps us to realize is how Isocrates' concern for literacy shifted the power of rhetoric from an oral, local force to a more expansive generalized power that helped to foster and promote his campaign for panhellenism. “With the increase in the speed and ease of communication, both physically and through the written medium,” Crick observes, “Greece of the fourth century [BCE] was more and more becoming a political entity rather than a merely geographical one, and its increased scope and complexity required a medium of power, the written word, as well as a pattern of rhetorical address which could coordinate the affairs of multiple parties over a distance with detail and reliability” (183–84). Crick asks us to see the phenomenon of Isocrates (if we may call him that) as offering a form of power through a rhetoric that ushers “in the new age of representative publicity” (185). Isocrates' dream was to design a rhetoric that tribal city-states could share with a common political order and common leadership; in short, “a common Logos” (191).All that Crick does up to this point in Rhetoric and Power helps us to see rhetoric as a force in a new and important way. In this same spirit, we can now look at Aristotle's Rhetoric differently. The beginning passages of Aristotle's Rhetoric make it clear that Aristotle sees rhetoric as a source of power, even civic power. Yet Aristotle's treatment is not merely a study of an Athenian civic rhetoric of power but also an exploration of rhetoric that is intended to be generalized across city-states, a more universal accounting of rhetoric, rhetoric that is oral as well as written. As Crick observes: “In Aristotle's comprehensive vision, then, rhetoric becomes the means by which political power purifies itself through trial and error” (201). For Aristotle, Crick notes, rhetoric is a “civilizing power” that enables popular audiences to seek and attain a shared notion of aletheia (truth) that contributes to “the growth of civilization” through the deliberation of endoxa (reputable opinions) that are shared by everyone “or by the majority or by the wise” (201, 212). In short, as Crick argues, “truth, power and democracy” each serve the good of the other when rhetoric is employed in such a manner (213).It should be apparent that I consider Rhetoric and Power to be an excellent piece of scholarship, worthy of the accolades that I have given and that will doubtlessly follow from other historians of rhetoric. Are there any features that could have made this excellent work even better? There are only a few, and these are not offered as a corrective but rather as a complement to the contributions of this work. The treatment of Thucydides could have been expanded to include other historians in more detail. Herodotus, for example, is recognized as the first Greek historian because he explained how the Athenians came to defeat the Persians. More than merely chronicling events, he claimed that the Athenians had discovered the power of the collective force of democracy over the inherent flaws of Persian tyranny. I also believe that a more extended discussion of how epideictic rhetoric manifests power—especially in the treatment of Greek comedy—would have been beneficial. Finally, I believe that an extended treatment of William M. A. Grimaldi's brilliant commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric would have provided a richer understanding of Aristotle's view of rhetoric's dunamis and energia than offered in this otherwise insightful analysis of Aristotelian rhetoric.Crick concludes Rhetoric and Power by stating that “rhetoric as a conscious art of constituting, transforming, challenging, and channeling power came into being within the drama of Classical Greece during the height of the tragic age, and it is only within a dramatic retelling that we can capture its spirit” (225). Crick shows that both in classical Greece and even today rhetoric has the capacity to serve as “a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226). Rhetoricians such as Crick and myself hold onto the hope that the power of rhetoric will be used in this manner. What makes Crick's hope substantial is that his work does not buoy it up with empty platitudes but rather demonstrates through careful and insightful scholarship what happens when it is realized.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.50.2.0233
  2. Rhetoric In Situ
    Abstract

    The essays in this volume were selected from the 2016 Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric: “Rhetoric In situ” held in Atlanta, Georgia. The archaeological term in situ describes an artifact found in its original resting place. Artifacts not in situ are generally considered to lack context and possess less value to the archaeologist. This theme was, in part, inspired by Richard Leo Enos’s call for “rhetorical archeology,” including the discovery of new texts and recognition of nontraditional artifacts, as well as new approaches with greater attention to context (40). Similarly, Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt have argued that one way to enhance our study of rhetoric’s traditions might be to “examine the rhetorical activity of a particular historical period in depth, with traditional, non-traditional, and new texts providing contexts for each other, and all embedded in much ‘thicker’ historical and cultural contextual descriptions than scholarship has provided heretofore” (23). Such a synchronic approach might demand new or borrowed methods, for example, those of cultural geography, archaeology, or art history. The essays included here reflect concerns about the scope of the rhetorical tradition, methods of rhetorical historiography, the recovery of nontraditional rhetorical artifacts, and ways of addressing rhetorical context, all of which lie within the expansive bounds of rhetoric in situ.The essays in the issue are organized somewhat thematically, grouped around Dave Tell and Diane Favro’s keynote addresses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the essays are deeply rooted in place—the Mississippi Delta (Tell), Atlanta (Adamczyk), northern Georgia (Eatman), Jordan and Syria (Hayes), Rome (Favro), Athens (Kennerly), and Ancient Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi (Geraths). The attention to methods used by the authors in this collection stand out. The first two essays by Tell and Adamczyk offer the kind of “thick” contextual work referenced by Bizzell and Jarratt but offer a diachronic approach to examine how memory and place change over time in relation and response to complex historic, social, and economic factors. The next two essays (by Eatman and Hayes) use a “participatory approach to rhetorical criticism … to analyze embodied and emplaced rhetoric” referred to as “in situ rhetorical fieldwork” (Middleton et al., 1). Favro’s approach bridges the essays that use participatory methodology and the classically focused essays that follow through the use of experiential technology. This technology allows the contemporary scholar to experience ancient places. The last two essays (by Kennerly and Geraths) turn to place as a lens to investigate (the reception of) canonical figures/texts informed and reformed by archaeological discoveries.Dave Tell’s keynote “Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory” opens the symposium issue by articulating the importance of the “politics of being on site” and the interrelationships of money, topography, affective power, and race in remembering Till. While Tell argues that “memory is established by place,” he concludes that the inverse is true as well: “the sites of [Till’s] murder have been transformed by its commemoration.” Similarly, Christopher Lee Adamczyk, in “Confederate Memory in Post-Confederate Atlanta—a Prolegomena,” argues for considering the changing physical and social contexts of memory sites over time. In this case, Adamczyk examines how monuments in Oakland Cemetery (an obelisk and the Lion of Atlanta) representing the “lost cause” narrative were located outside (spatially and ideologically) Atlanta, which was considered a progressive model of the “New South”; however, in the early 20th century a complex set of circumstances including the expansion of the industrialized city into the area once used as Civil War battlefields ultimately changed the relationship between the city and the “lost cause” narrative.Also focused on the geographic South, Megan Eatman’s essay, “Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment,” uses rhetorical fieldwork—participant observation at lynching reenactments—to access embodied memory. She marks this approach as in tension with the archive, which tends to present lynching photography from the perspective of white supremacists who took the photos and inadequately accounts for loss. Here Eatman advocates for participatory methods as an opportunity to access the “repeated embodied transfer of cultural memory” and to decenter racist narratives of lynching. Though focused on a very different moment in time and place—2014 Jordan—Heather Ashley Hayes’s “Doing Rhetorical Studies In Situ: The Nomad Citizen in Jordan” is closely related to the previous essay, particularly in its critique of power, though the emphasis shifts from a focus on emplaced rhetoric to a focus on embodied rhetorics about place. Hayes argues explicitly for participator rhetorical fieldwork not just for the sake of documenting “the moment of rhetorical invention,” but as a means for the rhetorical critic to “co-create imagined rhetorical possibility,” “destabilize colonial power,” and “to suggest that a literal transportation of the rhetorician into a space where discourse is being produced can, and should, be considered one way the arc of materialist rhetoric can intersect with struggles for decolonizing our field.”The final set of essays in this volume shifts to the classical period where the in situ methodologies discussed in the first set of essays becomes more challenging, if not impossible, given that access to place is limited. The classical essays begin with another keynote address from the symposium by Diane Favro, architectural historian and the founder and director of UCLA’s Experiential Technology Lab. In “Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ,” she takes a research question: Did the changes to the city of Rome by the emperor Augustus effect the way an average viewer experienced the city? Using digital humanities technology, Favro is able show how a contemporary researcher can still experience the ancient landscape to answer such questions. Kennerly, while also focused on the classical period, departs from the participatory and experiential, instead using situatedness as a lens to examine Socrates. She argues that simultaneously we know more of the “hyperlocalized” Socrates through archeology and the decontextualizes Socrates through his reception. Socrates was, Kennerly argues, an outsider in Athens and as such is often a resource for others in liminal spaces—here Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. Cory Geraths “Early Christian Rhetoric(s) In Situ” closes the volume by answering Enos’s call for a rhetorical archeology—both recounting the discovery of gnostic texts in the 19th and 20th centuries and suggesting the implications of those texts for the field, including a better understanding of women’s participation in early Christian rhetoric.The scholarship from the 2016 symposium envisions the future of the history of rhetoric as richly embodied and emplaced, intertextual, dynamic in methodology, and importantly, engaged with discourses of power in an effort to recover diverse voices, memories, and experiences.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1337414
  3. Kant’s Philosophy of Communication
    Abstract

    Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1325666

April 2017

  1. Embodying Truth: Sylvia Rivera’s Delivery ofParrhesiaat the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally
    Abstract

    Sylvia Rivera is a critical figure in queer and activist rhetorical history. At the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in 1973, Rivera engaged in parrhesia to push the movement to include and amplify the voices and needs of the most vulnerable members of the gay community: drag queens, homeless youth, gay inmates in prison and jail, and transgender people. Her delivery, including voice, gesture, and interaction with the audience, emphasizes the truthfulness, frankness, and criticism of her truth. By analyzing Rivera’s delivery of parrhesia, this article draws attention to the body’s role in speaking the truth as an activist rhetorical act.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1282224

March 2017

  1. Framing illness through Facebook enabled online support groups
    Abstract

    This article examines the illness/recovery narratives created through Facebook and shared in groups associated with the trauma of venous thrombolytic events (VTEs). Until recently, there was little public focus on VTE recovery; however, due to advances in medicine, patients who might have once died are now surviving, but there is limited literature about what surviving a VTE means for the individual. As a result, people look for others like themselves to help them adjust to this situation. In this context, Facebook affordances help extend traditional illness narratives between patient and healthcare provider from a private to semi-public or public space. Individuals participating in these groups transform not only themselves, but others, eliciting empathy, sharing experiences, and developing a platform upon which to critique healthcare practices.

    doi:10.1145/3068755.3068758
  2. “The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography
    Abstract

    This article explores the rhetoric of medieval rabbi and philosopher Saadya Gaon, arguing that Saadya typifies what LuMing Mao calls the “interconnectivity” of rhetorical cultures (Mao 46). Suggesting that Saadya makes use of argumentative techniques from Greek-inspired, rationalist Islamic theologians, I show how his rhetoric challenges dominant works of rhetorical historiography by participating in three interconnected cultures: Greek, Jewish, and Islamic. Taking into account recent scholarship on Jewish rhetoric, I argue that Saadya’s amalgamation of Jewish rhetorical genres alongside Greco-Islamic genres demonstrates how Jewish and Islamic rhetoric were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the article analyzes the rhetorical significance of Saadya’s most famous treatise on Jewish philosophy, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, which I argue utilizes Greco-Islamic rhetorical strategies in a polemical defense of rabbinical authority. As a tenth-century writer who worked across multiple rhetorical traditions and genres, Saadya challenges the monocultural, Latin-language histories of medieval rhetoric, demonstrating the importance of investigating Arabic-language and Jewish rhetorics of the Middle Ages.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0016

January 2017

  1. Looking Outward: Archival Research as Community Engagement
    Abstract

    This article examines archival research as a generative community literacy practice. Through the example of a community-based project centered on archival research, I examine the increased possibility the archives hold as a site for rhetorical invention based on collaboration that includes contemporary community members and the recovered rhetoric of historical figures. I argue that archival research as community literacy practice creates conditions for a communal form of literacy sponsorship and offer a framework for approaching the archives.

    doi:10.25148/clj.11.2.009132
  2. “Someone Just Like Me”: Narrative, Figured World, and Uptake in Therapeutic Books for Youths With Mental Health Disorders
    Abstract

    This study extends a line of inquiry established by researchers using narrative theory to investigate the discourses of psychiatry. Drawing primarily on theories of narrative and genre, the study analyzes a series of autobiographical books intended for an audience of youth suffering from mental illness. Our research investigates how the rhetorical design of the books harnesses the discursive affordances of autobiographical narrative to encourage a particular uptake on the part of a reader suffering from mental illness. Performing an analysis of four of the books in the series, we found them to exhibit a design in which autobiographical narrative is used to prompt an anticipated uptake by the reader: motivation to commit to therapy and engage in lifelong self-care. The study offers insights to authors producing texts intended to support psychiatric practitioners in guiding youth toward recovery from mental illness.

    doi:10.1177/0741088316681997

December 2016

  1. Introduction to the Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing
    Abstract

    The authors offer an introduction to the special issue on veterans’ writing, highlighting the four major areas of work that emerge in the issue: 1) veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on university campuses or at military bases; 3) faculty development initiatives that help prepare university faculty, instructors, and TAs for their work with veterans in the classroom. A fourth area centers around veterans’ creative works—poetry, in particular—and reviews of the literature of veterans studies and veterans’ writing.

    doi:10.59236/rjv16i2pp3-19
  2. What Writers Do: Behaviors, Behaviorism, and Writing Studies
    Abstract

    This article offers a fuller account than we currently have of the complex, uneasy relationship between behaviorism and writing studies in order both to complicate our disciplinary historiography and to encourage writing scholars, teachers, and program administrators to articulate productive and unproductive understandings of writing behaviors.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201628880