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5494 articlesJuly 2013
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Business English as a Lingua Franca in Advertising Texts in the Arabian Gulf: Analyzing the Attitudes of the Emirati Community ↗
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Scholars have become increasingly interested in how organizations communicate with external stakeholders, such as consumers. Recent studies have looked specifically at consumer response to the use of English in advertising texts in a number of different European countries. The use of English in such texts is part of a commonly used marketing strategy to standardize advertising campaigns that builds on the assumption that English is not only neutral but also widely understood. This article presents the results of a survey of the attitudes of Emirati consumers toward the use of English in advertising texts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The survey findings are discussed in terms of the unique social and cultural fabric of the modern-day UAE, as well as of the Emirati community as an economically powerful Muslim population.
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Lessons in Service Learning: Developing the Service Learning Opportunities in Technical Communication (SLOT-C) Database ↗
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Abstract We justify and describe our development of the Service Learning Opportunities in Technical Communication (SLOT-C) Database. The database broadens the range of organizations that instructors and students have for client-based communication projects. We argue in support of incorporating service learning into classes and facilitating partnerships among university instructors, their students, and nonprofits. We report strategies we learned for working with student interns and IT experts and strategies we developed as we worked with usability-test participants. Keywords: client-based communication projectsiterative designservice learning opportunitiestechnical communicationuser-centered design ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We sincerely thank the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication for awarding us a research grant in 2009 to build this database. We greatly appreciate Sam Singer, whose expertise in databases and Web development made the concept become a reality. We would also like to thank Stewart Whittemore, who contributed ideas in the early planning stage. Notes Waterfall design involves creating a design to which you are firmly committed early in development and letting all design decisions flow from the initial plan. Iterative design is more flexible, allowing the plan to change as needed in response to feedback. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSusan A. Youngblood Susan A. Youngblood teaches technical and professional communication at Auburn University, and many of her classes feature service learning. Her research addresses vulnerability, accessibility, and competing needs in communication, particularly in online environments. Jo Mackiewicz Jo Mackiewicz teaches editing at Auburn University. Her research applies linguistics to technical communication and focuses on politeness and credibility in evaluative texts such as tutoring interactions, editing sessions, and online reviews.
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Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/75/6/collegeenglish23834-1.gif
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Femicide and Rhetorics of Coadyuvante in Ciudad Juárez: Valuing Rhetorical Traditions in the Americas ↗
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This article analyzes the writings of activist women in modern-day Juárez, Mexico. I present their explanations about their own composition and delivery of two particular activist campaigns, highlighting the rhetorical strategies and practices they developed. Looking closely at these two campaigns, the article describes the rhetorical concept of coadyuvante developed by the activists in response to the rhetorical and material problem of femicide (the killing of women based on their gender) in Juárez.
June 2013
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Reviews Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne. Edited with an introduction by W. B. Gerard. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. 284 pp. + CD. ISBN 978-1611491210 $62.50 The charge against Laurence Sterne (1713-68) as a sermon writer was once that he was somehow insincere—lukewarm, sensual, distractible— and that, as a result of these alleged moral failings, his religious writing was suspect. The very great successes of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental journey (1768) further downgraded The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760, 1766, 1769). W. B. Gerard's Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne continues the efforts of Melvyn New and others to repair the double neglect to which the sermons were subject. Dismissed by Victorians in light of Sterne's supposed character, diminished as sermons by changes in popular taste, and tolerated by disappointed Shandeans looking for greater specimens of literary genius, the sermons of "Yorick"—never out of print, but in some critical disfavor since the early nineteenth century—are now receiving renewed attention. The current interest in rhetoric, religion, and literature serves the sermons well, as scholars are now equipped to evaluate Sterne's sermons with an appreciation for their particular origins, audiences, and uses. The essays in Gerard's collection agree that the view of Sterne as a hypocritical sensualist, unserious about Christianity and somehow careless about his pastoral duties, is both historically suspect and not very relevant to the actual sermons. Gerard's introduction reviews the critical history of the sermons—their initial success, later reduction to "ancillary" status within Sterne's oeuvre, and more recent recovery as religious addresses worthy of attention on their own account, and not merely as moral essays by a genius (p. 24). The repair of Sterne's reputation as a sermon writer began with pioneering studies by Wilbur L. Cross, Lansing Van Der Heyden Hammond, Arthur H. Cash (whose historic essay on "The Sermon in Tristram Shandy" is included in the present volume), and James Downey, and was further enhanced by New's work in introducing and annotating the sermons for The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (p. 22). New argued that insufficient understanding of the nature of the Anglican sermon, with its late seventeenth-century influences and its special role in discouraging enthusiasm among ordinary parishioners, tended to distort reception, as did Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 3, pp. 331-349, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.3.331. 332 RHETORICA misplaced assumptions about the "comic" tendencies of Sterne's wit. Rather than looking for something uniquely Shandean, New suggested, readers should familarize themselves with the "the vast sea of sermon literature" and be attentive to Sterne's reworkings of tried-and-true messages.1 New s "Preface by Way of a Sermon," introducing the volume of notes, is a seminal essay for considering the sermons rhetorically, underscoring the need for deeper awareness of the contexts of Sterne's preaching, the demands of his pastoral duties, and the volumes of well-known sermons and homiletic writing that would have informed most preachers' compositions. Indeed, as most readers will rely at least in part on New's scholarship in tracking Sterne's influences, the two volumes of the Florida Edition are really the coordinate texts for this collection. The revolution of critical opinion has therefore brought us back to one of the original grounds for Sterne's popularity: his talents as a sentimen tal Christian moralist working in a popular genre of real importance to his contemporaries. The puerile criterion of "sincerity"—in which the lack of Methodist-style evangelical rhetoric is somehow held against a latitudinarian , antienthusiastic preacher—no longer obtains, and the romantic criterion of "originality" is reduced to its proper place, i.e., barely relevant in an age and to a form that sought to transmit approved, not innovative wisdom, as several of...
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The editor introduces the articles in this issue and previews upcoming special themed issues.
May 2013
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Other| May 01 2013 Addresses of Contributors to this Issue Rhetorica (2013) 31 (2): 236–237. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.236 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Addresses of Contributors to this Issue. Rhetorica 1 May 2013; 31 (2): 236–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.236 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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The editors introduce the articles in this issue and reflect on their editorship.
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Abstract This essay presents a method for reconsidering identities linked to place and the rhetoric used to construct them. Drawing from Jane Bachnik's "uchi/soto dynamic" and Kaori Chino's study of Tang-dynasty Chinese art's place in early Japanese regional identity, it introduces a theory of inside-outside positionalities for engaging the meaning-making potential within tropes of inside-outside, foreign-local, and traditional-modern. This theory building is followed by a reading of the "invented tradition" (Hobsbawm) of the Japanese Christmas cake, one of many symbols constituting post-war Japanese identity. The Christmas cake gains its significance simultaneously through overt reference to a supposed foreign origin and from less overt citation of older Japanese traditions—while marked as coming from "outside" local culture, the Christmas cake has strong local meanings specific to Japan, meanings unfamiliar in the cake's supposed place of origin. While this essay focuses on meaning-making in Japan, inside-outside positionalities functions broadly as a comparative methodology for rhetorical study. Notes 1For examples of such work, see Damián Baca's Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations and the Territories of Writing and LuMing Mao's Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie. 2In this sense, inside-outside positionalities parallels the workings of "common sense" ideology as explained by Norman Fairclough (77–108). Additional informationNotes on contributorsDominic Ashby Dominic Ashby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and is Coordinator of BUS102: Writing for Business Decision-Making in the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, 356 Bachelor Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.
April 2013
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Audiences, Brains, Sustainable Planets, and Communication Technologies: Four Horizons for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology ↗
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This response to papers by Leah Ceccarelli, Randy Harris, and Carl Herndl and Lauren Cutlip in the “Horizons of Possibility” panel at the 2012 ARST Vicentennial conference raises questions about each of the visions as they relate, respectively, to ARST audiences, brain science, and sustainable planets and programs. It also suggests renewed attention to communication technologies by scholars studying the rhetoric of science and technology, maintaining that rhetoricians need to come to terms with emerging twenty-first century communicative forms.
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The future of the rhetoric of science—which will increasingly take the form of a rhetoric of technology, science, and medicine (RTSM)—will be shaped by its move away from its modernist, humanistic roots in response to institutional pressures and historical contingencies. This paper advocates a “praxiographical” emphasis on the ability to intervene in science policy and other STEM-related discourses for the field of RTSM. It describes four research foci emerging from this emphasis to be used as areas of programmatic concern at an Institute for Applied Rhetoric of Science and Sustainability at the newly organized Patel College of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida.
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In this short response to the papers in the “Horizons of Possibility” group, I first identify a dialectic between calls to disciplinarity and calls to engagement. Then, instead of offering a transcendent synthesis, I point to two recent narratives suggesting that stakeholders in scientific debates are starting to seek out rhetoricians as resources.
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Front matter for Reflections Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 2013 issue.
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In modern usage, living “off the grid” means living totally independently, without the modern conveniences of publicly supplied gas, electricity, and water; it also refers to people who strive to remain unrecorded in governmental, financial, and medical documents. More generally, to live off the grid is to live against the grain of society, ideologically at odds with the mainstream. As we have put the idea to use for this guestedited issue, “Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid,” instructors who incorporate noncanonical texts into their classrooms resemble the above definitions in several respects. For one thing, to teach “off the grid” is almost always to teach selfsufficiently — to locate the texts you think are important and figure out for yourself why they are important, to provide or create your own introductory notes, glosses, and other relevant contextualizing material for your students. It is to build a lesson literally from the ground up. You are certainly off the beaten path, without much assistance or advice from textbooks, teachers’ manuals, online resources, or other scholars’ work; there is little, if anything, to vouch for or justify your lesson plan. To put it simply, and most generally, to teach off the grid is to teach outside the comfort zone of the canon, without the builtin validations and pedagogies that literary tradition provides. The challenges of teaching off the grid are many, but this issue of Pedagogy argues that the rewards are great. Noncanonical texts can shed light on perspectives different from those represented by the culturally authoritative texts of the canon, often can serve the useful purpose of defamiliarizing traditional readings, and
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Editorial| April 01 2013 A Note from the Editors Jennifer L. Holberg; Jennifer L. Holberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marcy Taylor Marcy Taylor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (2): 203–204. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1963195 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; A Note from the Editors. Pedagogy 1 April 2013; 13 (2): 203–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1963195 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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ABSTRACT This article mines the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur in order to construct a critical framework for the rhetorical analysis of public memory. Through a reading of Ricoeur's concept of “threefold mimesis,” I develop the idea of the “agential spiral.” The “spiral” frames a repetitive yet progressive process in which a series of agents or groups of agents both interpret and act in response to the past. When linked together, these moments of agency form a spiral that metaphorizes the process of creating and deploying public memories across time. I argue that the concept of the agential spiral enables scholars to focus not only on the ways that memories unite human agents synchronically but also on how those memories structure a relationship among agents across time through the performance and representation of agency. I situate this argument within scholarship on rhetorical studies and public memory.
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The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle's corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle's definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric's ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle's treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle's terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.Defined as a capacity, rhetoric occupies a peculiar position with regard to existing practices of oratory and rhetorical instruction. In Metaphysics 9, dunamis describes “potentiality” of substances and nonrational animals and “ability” of humans. Among human dunameis, some are innate (such as the senses), some come by practice (such as flute playing), some are acquired through learning (such as the capacities of the crafts, technai) (see 1047b 33–35). Art “comes into being when out of many notions from experience we form one universal belief concerning similar facts,” and while experienced persons “know the fact but not the why of it,” those who possess a techne “know the why of it or the cause” (Aristotle 1979, 13). Accordingly, master craftsmen “are considered wiser not in virtue of their ability to do something but in virtue of having the theory and knowing the causes” (Aristotle 1979, 13). We see a similar logic at work in the opening chapter of the Rhetoric. As a rational capacity, rhetoric seems to be present among the general population, since most people are able to engage in verbal self-defense or attack. But their ability is often the result of random chance or habit rather than of a systematic art (Rhetoric 1354a). While one is unlikely to gain rhetorical dunamis through sheer experience, Aristotle insinuates that studying other currently available arts of rhetoric is even less preferable, for these arts give disproportionate attention to “matters outside the subject” (“ta exō tou pragmatos”) (Aristotle 1991a, 5, 7, 11). By offering a systematic investigation of “available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991a, 13) and stressing proofs (pisteis) and arguments (logoi), Aristotle sets up his version of the art above those purveyed by writers of rhetorical handbooks and other master teachers.Admittedly, the text of the Rhetoric disavows the first chapter's attack on other technai's treatment of emotions and matters “outside the subject” as it proceeds to furnish an extensive discussion of human emotions in book 2 and addresses style and delivery in book 3.3 However, the manner in which it presents rhetorical proofs and stylistic devices is detached from practices of oratory. Whether Aristotle considers rhetorical genres or emotions, his method of exposition is characterized by “surgical detachment and description” (Dubois 1993, 125). So, for example, he investigates the causes of anger without actually examining how this passion was stirred by a particular orator. According to Kennedy, the Rhetoric is one of Aristotle's “most Athenian works,” “for only in Athens did rhetoric fully function in the way he describes” (1996, 418), but the treatise contains little evidence of its author's direct contact with rhetorical practices of Athenian democracy. As J. C. Trevett has shown, “Aristotle fails … to quote from or allude to the text of a single deliberative or forensic speech” and instead “attributes statements or arguments to a particular speaker” or draws on various poetic genres such as epic, tragedy, and lyric (1996, 371, 372, 375). At the same time, Aristotle quotes extensively from epideictic compositions, including those written by Isocrates, for whom Aristotle reserves a minor place in the context of his discussion of style. This curiously inconsistent use of citations can be explained, in part, by the relative ease of access to literary genres and the paucity of deliberative and forensic texts, on the one hand, and Aristotle's lack of firsthand experience of oral practices of Athenian democracy due to his status as a resident alien, on the other.Yet Aristotle's many disparaging remarks about pandering orators and easily excitable and ignorant audiences indicate an entrenched suspicion toward the power of performed speech, the very power his rhetoric as dunamis is designed to guard against. The Rhetoric is indeed “the most Athenian” of Aristotle's works in the sense that in it the philosopher responds to an ideology that he regards as inimical to philosophical life and civic education.4 Aristotle is unequivocal that rhetoric would be of little use in a well-ordered state, since in such a state legislation limits the role of judges to a minimum and judges, in turn, are drawn from the ranks of prudent citizens. By contrast, in a corrupt regime such as Athenian democracy, judges are assigned their roles by lot and their decision making is often obscured by passion and self-interest (Rhetoric 1354a32–1354b12). It is the fickle and corrupt disposition of the demos that calls for the use of style and delivery that Aristotle considers vulgar and superfluous to proper argumentation (Rhetoric 1404a). Eager to meet their audience's expectations, orators worry more about securing the hearers' approval than about demonstrating the truth of their position. Aristotle observes the same deplorable state of affairs both in dramatic competitions and political contests, where a skillful performance, not the integrity of a tragic plot or a logically compelling demonstration, wins applause (Rhetoric 1403b).5 Not only does the audience influence the form and content of drama and oratory—it corrupts the very character of performers. Aristotle's association of performance in drama and oratory with pandering to a corrupt set of listeners is thus consonant with the conceptualization of rhetoric as a dunamis, a rational capacity that does not require imitation or practice.The status of rhetoric as a dunamis and a techne secures its position as a form of philosophically legitimate knowledge, for it allows its students to understand the “why” of persuasion without committing them to a morally precarious life of political performance in a corrupt regime. At the same time, rhetoric does not stand on its own as a “theory of civic discourse,” as the subtitle of Kennedy's translation (1991) of the Rhetoric calls it. Although the treatise's language, preoccupation with abstract categorization, and apparent detachment from the particulars of oratory might qualify it as a “theory” in our contemporary sense, for Aristotle rhetoric is a productive art, not to be confused with theoria, the highest form of philosophical knowledge that rules over practical and productive arts.6 In Aristotle's hierarchy of knowledge, rhetoric is subordinated to politike, the “master art” in the sphere of praxis, which comprises ethics and politics (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b). As complementary parts of politike, ethics and politics investigate the principles that guide the attainment of virtue and practical wisdom and the forms of political organization most congenial to this pursuit.Aristotle would likely be surprised by our inclination to read the Rhetoric as a theory of civic discourse, since he explicitly disapproves of those who, “partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses,” take the appearance of rhetoric as an “offshoot” of politike to mean that the two are the same art (Aristotle 1991a, 19). He points out that rhetoric, though it “slips under the garb” of politike, is but a dunamis of furnishing arguments (tou porisai logous), not an art of good life and good government (Aristotle 1991a, 19). Here he doesn't seem to be criticizing handbook writers; rather this objection is likely a reference to Isocrates, whose logon paideia was in Aristotle's sights when he lectured on rhetoric at the Academy and Lyceum. Isocrates regards discourse (logos) as an artificer of civic institutions and embraces the performative and politically constitutive character of traditional Greek education (paideia) by making character and political identity dependent on recurrent performance addressed to the polis. Despite his elitism, Isocrates accepts the norms of his rhetorical culture and tries to adapt them to a literary medium. On the contrary, Aristotle aspires to protect the practical rationality and virtue of a properly habituated student from being corrupted by these very cultural norms. It could be argued that Aristotle's effort to split the traditional link between eloquence (eu legein) and virtuous action (eu prattein) by making them subjects of different arts (rhetorike and politike, respectively) is a response to Isocrates' “boastful” incorporation of the two under the name philosophia.7By conceiving of rhetoric as a dunamis, Aristotle distances the art from practical oratory and reduces it to a faculty in the service of substantive intellectual disciplines. Why, then, are we (academic students of rhetoric) so beholden to this treatise? The text's current prestige is hardly the consequence of the way the rhetorical tradition has viewed it. As Carol Poster summarizes the history of its transmission and interpretation: Hellenistic rhetoricians didn't know it; neoplatonic commentators overlooked it; the Byzantines didn't understand it; the early Middle Ages didn't have it; the late middle ages and Renaissance scholars were puzzled by it; and not until the prejudice against Aristotle due to its association with scholasticism died away was the Rhetorica revived alongside Ciceronian rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (1998, 332)The rise of the Rhetoric to its position of dominance in the twentieth century has many possible explanations. One of them, undoubtedly, is the name of Aristotle, whose historical authority is recognized across the university and, as such, allows scholars from less prestigious and less well-funded fields (such as rhetoric and composition) to gain at least some measure of respectability by sheer association with the Philosopher.8 Another reason is the ascendance of theory among the humanities and social sciences due to the increasing stress on research over teaching in modern universities. Perhaps because the Rhetoric looks so much more like “theory” than the fragmented record of the sophists and the writings of Isocrates, it has come to be regarded as a high point of rhetoric's evolution as an intellectual discipline in the fourth century BCE and a solid point of departure for contemporary students.9 This teleological view has not gone unchallenged, of course, but the recovery and interpretation of what Aristotle's conceptualization of rhetoric has marginalized or suppressed is an ongoing project.10 I would therefore like to conclude with a plea to young scholars to keep up questioning the beginnings of our discipline, including Aristotle's not-so-innocent definition of rhetoric.
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You, who call yourself a rhetorician, what is your art? With what particular thing is your skill concerned? Weaving is concerned with fabricating fabrics, music with making melodies; rhetorician, with what is your know-how concerned? This is the question that Socrates poses to Gorgias in Plato's notorious refutation of rhetoric: “Peri tēs rhētorikēs, peri ti tōn ontōn estin epistēmē?” (1925, 268). Socrates' question frames rhetoric in the genitive case—which, in this case, specifies the source or origin of one thing from another. To ask of rhetoric “peri ti tōn ontōn?” is to ask from whence rhetoric comes, from where rhetoric originates, from what rhetoric is generated. So Socrates' question—“peri ti tōn ontōn?”—asks about rhetoric's domain.Gorgias—or, to be fair, Plato's ventriloquized version of Gorgias—answers that rhetoric is concerned with speech: “Peri logous” (1925, 268). Gorgias reframes Socrates' genitive question, responding in the accusative case. While the genitive case identifies one thing as generated from another, the accusative case identifies something that is being acted on by another. The genitive case specifies a species of some genus; the accusative case addresses the direct object of some action. So Gorgias explains rhetoric's origin by pointing to its object. Gorgias' answer supplies the source of rhetoric's generation by delineating its object domain: “peri logous.” Rhetoric is about, is composed of, and comes from speech.But, Socrates responds, the same is true of many other technai: medicine, gymnastics, arithmetic, and geometry, for example. These, too, are concerned with speech: speech about bodily condition or speech about numbers. Pressed, Gorgias clarifies that rhetoric is the power to speak and also to persuade: “Legein kai peithein” (Plato 1925, 278). But, Socrates still asks, to speak and to persuade about what? He presses on, parroting, “Peri ti? Peri ti?” (Plato 1925, 272–274). What is rhetoric about? “Peri ti tōn ontōn?” What is rhetoric's ontic domain? To what class of objects does it belong? From what category of existing things does it emerge?While Plato's Gorgias plays along with this ontogenetic question, Aristotle's response to the Gorgias in the opening book of his Rhetoric questions the terms of that question. Plato's repeated question—“Peri ti, peri ti?”—contains a categorical error. Or, to be more precise, Plato's error is categorization itself. Plato's question, Aristotle suggests, mistakenly attempts to contain rhetoric within a particular genus. Instead, Aristotle argues that rhetoric is “ou peri ti genos idion” (1926, 14). It is not concerned with any particular genus; it is not proper to any genus; it has no genus of its own. Aristotle writes that “ouk estin oute henos tinos genous aphōrismenou hē rhētorikē” (1926, 12). Rhetoric does not come from one definite kind of stuff; its horizon is not delimited to a single genus of somethings.This, Aristotle explains, differentiates rhetoric from all those other technai like medicine, geometry, and arithmetic. Each of them are indeed able to persuade about their own particular area of study: “peri to autē hypokeimenon” (Aristotle 1926, 14). These technai are about what they lie underneath: “hypo-,” meaning “below,” and “-keimenon,” meaning “positioned.” They come from and are subordinate to a specific genus, category, or class of things: arithmetic about numbers (peri arithmōn) or medicine about health (peri hugieinōn) (Aristotle 1926, 14). While these other arts are “to hypokeimenon”—set underneath their specific domains, as a species to a genus—rhetoric is instead “tōn prokeimenōn”—set before, set forward, set forth (Aristotle 1926, 14). And rhetoric is set forth in advance—what it is set before is generation or beginning itself.Rather than hypokeimenon, rhetoric is hyparchonta (1926, 12)—not lying underneath some genus but below the archē: underneath a beginning, a prime mover, or a first principle. So ironically, Aristotle's archē-definition of rhetoric undermines rhetoric's archē. Rhetoric's domain is the hyparchonta: beneath the first principle, before the beginning, in advance of the first move. Its genus is not speech and persuasion, legein kai peithein, as Plato has Gorgias say. No, Aristotle writes, the function of rhetoric is not persuasion itself—ou to peisai ergon autēs—but rather to see the hyparchonta pithana—the probabilities, plausibilities, or persuadabilities that exist before the work of persuasion begins (1926, 12). Paradoxically, the hyparchonta pithana have a mode of existence before their existence. The hyparchonta is caught between the already and the not-yet. This paradox is reflected in the two seemingly incompatible definitions of the term “hyparchonta”: “preexisting, taken-for-granted,” on one hand, and “allowable, possible,” on the other. To see the hyparchonta pithana is to see preexisting possibilities.A few lines later, Aristotle restates this definition of rhetoric as the ability to see the hyparchonta pithana but replaces the word “hyparchonta” with the term “endechomenon,” instead calling rhetoric the ability to see the “endechomenon pithanon” (1926, 14). This substitution of “hyparchonta” with “endechomenon” fittingly highlights the parallelism between the terms: like “hyparchonta,” the term “endechomenon” points to possibilities. Rhetoric, Aristotle writes, is “peri tōn phainomenōn endechesthai amphoterōs exein” (1926, 22). That is, rhetoric emerges from phenomena capable of carrying more than one possibility. The phrase “endechomenon pithanon,” most commonly rendered in English as “the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991, 37), thus defines persuasion's availability in a very precise sense: not available in the sense of an extant substantive object that is already there to use but instead as an imminent and immanent possibility of which rhetoric may avail itself. Explaining rhetoric's availability as possibility, Aristotle returns to the genitive case: rhetoric emerges not peri tōn ontōn, as Plato would have it, but “peri tōn endechomenōn” (Aristotle 1926, 24).Aristotle resists the Platonic gambit by refusing to collapse rhetoric's genitive genus with an ontic object. Recognizing that rhetoric is ou peri ti genos idion, without any genus of its own, Aristotle sidesteps Plato's trick question, “Peri ti tōn ontōn?” Aristotle stipulates that rhetoric comes not from some genus of ontically existing things but from the incipiently existing domain of the possible. He thus refuses the ruse of defining rhetoric's becoming through “qualified genesis,” the genesis of one thing out of another (ek tinos kai ti) (1955, 184). Rather than emerging out of some genus of ontically existing objects (ek tinos), rhetoric comes-to-be ek mē ontos, from that which has no ontic status (Aristotle 1955, 184, 198). The mode of becoming that Aristotle describes in the Rhetoric thus corresponds to what he elsewhere calls “genesis haplē,” or “unqualified becoming” (1955, 184).This mode of becoming is unqualified in two senses. First, it is unqualified in the sense that it is without qualification. It is not delimited by or limited to any specific class of objects with any specific characteristics. Unqualified becoming is thus thoroughgoing and absolute, not partial or particular. Rhetoric, as unqualified becoming, does not come to be from something in particular; rather, it comes to be from nothing in particular. Although it is common to read Aristotle's famous definition of rhetoric as a statement of rhetoric's particularity—“an ability in each case [peri hekaston] to see the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991, 37)—“peri hekaston” may instead be read as an assertion of rhetoric's indefinite genitive source. “Peri hekaston” translates not merely as “in each” but moreover as “about each and every.” In this definitive but indefinite definition, rhetoric does not just come out of a given case but can emerge from any given case whatsoever. As John Henry Freese puts it in his translation, the art of rhetoric is “not applied to any particular definite class of things” (Aristotle 1926, 15). Rhetoric, as peri hekaston, is not particular but imparticular.But here appears the second sense in which rhetoric's mode of becoming seems unqualified: arising out of nothing in particular, it may seem to come from nothing at all. This seemingly ex nihilo emergence may appear “unqualified” in the sense that it does not meet some prerequisite qualification or condition. Indeed, Aristotle writes that the unqualified mode of becoming is not just a transformation of one thing into another; it is a transubstantiation from the immaterial to the material. It is more than an alteration of qualities; it is a conversion of substance. This genesis haplē is absolute genesis in the sense that it is not a mere change from something else; it is the radical appearance of something new. This genesis “out of non-existence” (“ek mē ontos”) is a possibility's passage out of the imperceptible or anaesthetic (ek anaisthētou) (Aristotle 1955, 198). More than just seeing what already exists out there, rhetoric envisions possibilities that have not yet materialized. It does not follow from a previous generation; it is generation itself—genesis without an archē in any genus.Yet this unqualified genesis does not simply come out of nowhere. It does not spring from complete nonexistence. Rather, Aristotle explains, it emerges from “dunamei on entelecheiai mē on,” from that which exists potentially (dunamei) but not actually (entelechiai) (1955, 186). Unlike an actuality that simply exists, potentiality (to dunaton) is simultaneously capable of both existing and not existing: “kai einai kai mē einai” (Aristotle 1933, 460). Paradoxically, potentiality is a mode of being that can either be or not be. That is, its existence is possible rather than certain. Aristotle writes: “To ara dunaton einai endechetai” (1933, 460). Here, Aristotle links potentiality and possibility, dunaton and endechomenon, that which can be and that which may be. This is how rhetoric can have a mode of existence before its existence: it already exists as a potentiality but does not yet exist as an actuality. Aristotle emphasizes that rhetoric exists as a potentiality, or dunamis: “Estō dē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston” (1926, 14). That is: “Let rhetoric be an ability in each case.” Rhetoric exists (estō) potentially (dunamis)—but not actually—in any given case whatsoever. Rhetoric's being is a potentiality inherent in each and every particularity. Let rhetoric be an imparticular potentiality.But if rhetoric exists as an imparticular potentiality, does that mean that its domain is all-encompassing? If rhetoric's genesis is absolute, does that mean its domain is universal? If rhetoric can come from anywhere and everywhere, does that mean that rhetoric is anything and everything? Not actually—rhetoric's “object” is not actually a thing at all. That is, although rhetoric addresses an accusative object in the grammatical sense—the endechomenon pithanon—that domain of rhetorical possibility is not an ontic object in the material sense. Yet while rhetoric is not limited to any genus of actual things, rhetoric's domain does have a limit. Aristotle writes that the domain of rhetoric is not all-encompassing—“ou peri hapanta”—but only includes that which may possibly come to be or not—“all' hosa endechetai kai genesthai kai mē.” (1926, 38). Rhetoric's domain, that space of possible becoming, is bounded by necessity on one side and impossibility on the other. That which either must or must not be is none of rhetoric's concern. Impossibility and necessity are beyond rhetoric's scope. So what is rhetoric about? It is about generative potentialities.Against Plato's attempt to show that rhetoric lacks a definition because it does not belong to any domain of ontically existing things, Aristotle defines rhetoric's domain as precisely that which has no ontic existence but which nevertheless has the potential to appear. Aristotle thus subverts Plato's question, “Peri ti?,” “What is rhetoric about?” He refuses to objectify rhetoric's domain with that insidious little pronoun “ti.” Rhetoric, he counters, comes not from a “ti,” not a thing or a what, but rather a maybe, an indefinite domain that is less than something yet more than nothing (1933, 430). Instead of being generated from some ontically given genus of objects, rhetoric generates the appearance of actualities out of the underdetermined, not-yet-actualized domain of an immaterial potentiality that can be or not be.
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Abstract
James Arnt Aune, who served on the editorial board of Philosophy and Rhetoric, died on 8 January 2013. Jim was an accomplished scholar of the first rank, whose articles, books, and papers reflected broad knowledge and deep insight. He left his mark on the journal through frequent and reliably rigorous reviews that were distinctive for their careful attention to arguments and extensive historical and bibliographic references aimed at improving work, even when he had profound intellectual differences with the author. His comments to the editor often included his own concerns that he may have been too harsh or that his criticisms might be defeating to the author. I seldom felt the need to edit them, however, because his exemplary scholarship that made demands on a manuscript was matched by the constructiveness of his marvelous intellectual generosity. For those who knew Jim, his own work expressed erudition and, dare I say, academic bravery of the rarest sort. He gave expression to ideas, figures, and events on a historical arc in a way that enriched their meaning and energized his comments with trenchant force. His passing is a significant loss to the scholarly community and a profound sadness for those who knew him and had grown accustomed to his inimitable voice. —GAH
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Moving towards Ethnorelativism: A Framework for Measuring and Meeting Students' Needs in Cross-Cultural Business and Technical Communication ↗
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Scholars in business and technical communication have continuously made efforts to look for effective teaching approaches for cross-cultural business and technical communication; however, little research has been conducted to study the process by which students develop intercultural competence; fewer studies have been conducted to assess learners' needs for gaining intercultural competence in the globalization age. To assess students' level of intercultural competence and understand whether they are likely to change in response to teaching, I first introduce a two-part framework for teaching and learning intercultural business and technical communication: the DMIS model—Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, and the related instrument to assess intercultural sensitivity—the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Then I report the results of using the framework to assess and develop students' intercultural competence, and conclude the study by emphasizing the significance of the current empirical research and discuss the framework's limitations.
March 2013
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Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe by Marjorie Curry Woods ↗
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Reviews 223 original ceremony nt Sancta Maria ad Martyres from language that reflects the architecture of the building, the movements of the presiding Pope (Boni face IV), the clergy, and the dramatization of God s voice in the words of the chant. Mary Carruthers and the contributors to this volume have produced an extraordinary collection of essays, rich and complex with thematic intercon nections and many avenues for further exploration. The overall arrangement illustrates ductus in invention, arrangement, and figurative motifs in the art of rhetoric across disciplinary lines, including composition, oratory, art, archi tecture, music, and liturgical performance. Many of the essays also include excellent visual illustrations. The editing is careful, though one system for translations, provided in the text of some essays and in the endnotes of others, would aid consistency. Nevertheless, readers will find Carruthers7 collection a remarkable resource not only for historical and textual studies, but also for insights into medieval culture, worship, and performance through the art of rhetoric. Elza C. Tiner Lynchburg College Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Text and Context 2), Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. ISBN 9780814211090. Making a well-timed appearance close to the publications of both Copeland and Sluiter's Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Peter Mack's A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford Uni versity Press, 2011), Marjorie Curry Woods' new book helps us to imagine what took place in medieval and renaissance classes on the trivium. As her title suggests, Woods concentrates on commentaries written from the thir teenth through the seventeenth centuries on Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, a popular Latin poem extant in over two hundred manuscripts that taught students how to write poetry and prose. By "commentaries," Woods means an assortment of instructive materials from interlinear and marginal manuscript glosses to freestanding explanations, from anonymous interpre tations, such as the Early Commentary that Woods previously edited and translated (New York: Garland, 1985), to the works of well-known intellec tuals teaching in documentable circumstances. Woods inquires insightfully into what these commentaries meant for teaching grammar and rhetoric in western as well as central Europe, in elementary courses as well as in universities. The scope of this book is therefore daunting, but Woods deftly chooses particular commentaries and teachers that best exemplify the Poetria nova s 224 RHETORICA use. For instance, chapter 3 details Pace of Ferrara's humanist elaboration placing the Poetria nova amidst classical authorities and literatures, while chapter 4 emphasizes Dybinus of Prague's Aristotelian rhetorical interpreta tion. As Woods elucidates, such differing constructions show how variously the Poetria nova might function within European curricula: for Pace as an aid to intermediate students in construing literature, for Dybinus as a text for university students analyzing various models of rhetoric, and for others as a guide to dictamen or sermon composition. A reader can learn a substantial amount about intellectual history and educational scenarios from Woods. Such learning is possible because Woods writes in lucid, well-organized prose that appeals to both specialists and those interested more generally in the history of rhetoric and education. For the latter audience, her Preface clearly defines terms such as "accessus" and "lemmata" that will recur in describing the commentaries (xxxviii-xxxix). Further, she opens the book with fifteen plates illustrating the diversity of the commentaries and pro viding exempla for later chapters. Nine of these plates include the famous opening phrase of the Poetria nova ("Papa stupor mundi," or in English trans lation, "Holy Father, wonder of the world") that becomes the subject of so many speculations about Geoffrey's audience and purpose. Along with the manuscript illustrations, Woods provides copious translations of transcrip tions from commentaries. Sometimes the interjection of these visual aids can overwhelm Woods' discussion, for instance in the layout of versions of the Dybinus commentary (190- 208), but Woods' intention is to be generous with manuscript materials over which she has labored long, and indeed many readers would be challenged to assess the divergent points in the commentaries without these explicit side-by-side comparisons. Woods' presentation of manuscript transcriptions also offers doctoral students...
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Symposium response.
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Abstract
A s I write this response, the end of the term is nearing, and with it, the end of my weekly meetings with a diverse group of graduate students (literature program, writing program, school of education, composition program) enrolled in my "Literacy and Pedagogy" seminar.The issues raised by this symposium's contributors resonate and echo back with the seminar's term-long collective investigation, so it is from within this context and through the concerns these graduate students have articulated throughout the term that I want to join the conversation.But first a few words about the seminar itself, the historical, theoretical, and ideological scrutiny of literacy and pedagogy it calls for, the reflexive inquiry it incites, and the contributions this kind of inquiry can make to a discussion of "the implications of Literacy Studies research, theory, and practice for Composition Studies" (LiCS Mission Statement).I started teaching this seminar in the late 1980s.What I had initially proposed was a seminar in histories, theories and practices of pedagogy (which eventually, led to my articulation of "pedagogy as reflexive praxis" (Salvatori 4).The intellectual atmosphere of my department at the time was beginning to be hospitable to the idea that advanced graduate students from our different programs, with their different teaching experiences and theoretical backgrounds, could benefit from such a course of study.But, it was suggested, it might be strategic for me to combine "pedagogy" with "literacy, " since as the subject of a graduate seminar, literacy would carry greater intellectual weight than pedagogy, and attract more students (and, I sensed, raise fewer faculty eyebrows).Needless to say, I was taken aback by the suggestion, but because I was equally invested in the study of theories of literacy, I complied and decided to foreground in my course proposal what would have been in any case two of my planned lines of critical inquiry: what kinds of literacy different theories of reading and writing, and their pedagogical enactments, assume and can presume to foster (Cultural Literacy was earning large numbers of academic and non-academic acolytes); and what can a critical and reflexive study of pedagogy contribute to and draw from the study of literacy.The "and" in the title became and has since remained the central focus of the seminar's theoretical investigations, a nexus that through the years, because of different texts and different students, has consistently disclosed new and exciting "matters of concern" (Latour) for graduate students who are about to make crucial decisions about their professional future.Since the very first time, the diversity of students' backgrounds and interests led to more expansive and inclusive articulations of the seminar's original keywords and concepts (Glascott), and consequently of the seminar's affordances (Vieira).Even before we read Street, the use of the singular for literacy and pedagogy in the original title soon felt inaccurate, constrictive, but for bureaucratic reasons, it could not be changed.Thus "the singular" remained.But it consistently occasioned early
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The TYCA regional associations invite proposals for their 2013 conferences. The conference dates, themes, contact persons, and deadlines are listed below. For specific information, please contact the regional program chair listed.