Survey courses on the history of rhetoric, especially as taught in American universities, often concentrate on classical and modern rhetoric, neglecting the way in which rhetoric was understood during the Middle Ages. This essay offers the teacher of the history of rhetoric a pedagogical answer to the question of how to incorporate medieval rhetoric within courses on the history of rhetoric, by providing a close reading of three symmetrical cantos of Dante’s Commedia that are specifically concerned with the ethics of persuasive discourse.

Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic's democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar's first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one's discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh's and my own conception of academics as public intellectuals is that he understands the rhetor's imperative to deploy “all the available means of persuasion” collectively, whereas I understand it distributively.Thus, Welsh calls for a very tolerant attitude toward the exact rhetorical register in which academics engage with the public, calling on Kenneth Burke (1969) and Terry Eagleton (1990) as witnesses to the essential unpredictability and “polyvalence” of discursive uptake. In short, given sufficient time and space, anything said in any way in any context might just work, from which Welsh concludes that we should not be too judgmental of how our colleagues approach the public intellectual's role. Moreover, there may be something interesting to say—via Žižek—about the nature of the anxiety generated by the status of academics as public intellectuals. In contrast, I believe that each public intellectual is obliged to exploit the distinct communicative resources afforded by all the media. All public intellectuals should aspire to be “the compleat rhetor.” Of course, what can be conveyed in a heavily referenced tome cannot be conveyed in a three-part television series, let alone a live radio broadcast. However, the public intellectual is willing and able to play variations on her ideas across these different media. Even in our own time, despite the problems I discuss here, academics—three quite different but equally effective exemplars would be Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, and Niall Ferguson—have risen to the challenge.To be sure, the performance standards of public intellectual life may well exceed the abilities and dispositions of most academics, whose communicative comfort zone ends with their scholarly peers. I allude to what Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacities,” which are often reinforced by the constitution of the academic field. More specifically, I have in mind not the early nineteenth- century ideal Humboldtian academic who aspired to do research worth teaching. That is very much in the mold of the public intellectual, and its spirit still imbues many liberal arts colleges (Fuller 2009, chap. 1). Rather, I mean, in the first instance, a phenomenon to which Veblen himself was responding in the early twentieth-century—namely, the rise of graduate education and the fetishization of the PhD, which effectively disabled academics' impulse to communicate with the larger society by structuring career advancement in terms of an increasingly specialized community of fellow researchers. Thus, the academic shifted from broad- to narrowcaster. However, the early twenty-first century has imposed an additional layer of difficulty, as the decline in tenurable posts has exposed academics more directly to market pressures, rendering them more biddable to fashion, which in turn erodes the sense of intellectual autonomy that the specialist researcher still retained.Given this trajectory, it is perhaps not surprising that Welsh restricts his discussion of the prospects for the academic as public intellectual in terms of the likely uptake of one's message, which in his view might as well be sent in a bottle. For a paper whose title draws attention to political agency, remarkably little is said about what if any obligation the academic might have in trying to control the public reception of his message. Here I would put the stress on “trying,” since there is no guarantee that the academic will be received in a way that he finds satisfying. However, a key moment in democratic education occurs precisely during the negotiation of this sort of potential misunderstanding, a negotiation that may be likened to what happens when theory and practice are drawn closer together. In this respect, I find Welsh's appeal to the early Habermas (1973) misguided because—like his evil twin Allan Bloom (1987)—Habermas presumes that academics would be unduly authoritarian were they to try to dictate policies based on their research. The possibility of the public character of academic rhetoric becoming overbearing was perhaps a legitimate concern for Max Weber in the early twentieth century, when universities were still very elite institutions, but the accelerated expansion of university construction since the 1960s has rendered such a concern moot. The increase in access to academic channels of discourse—from student enrollments to journal publications—has effectively diluted academic authority. Indeed, the argument has been made that external funding, given its reliable scarcity, may be eclipsing publications as the main market signal of academic merit (Lamont 2009). More to the point, there would have been no need for Richard Dawkins to hold a chair in the “public understanding of science” were there a serious chance that “the scientific establishment” might soon succeed in dominating public opinion about the nature of reality.If anything, this implied fragmentation of epistemic authority—which I have dubbed “Protscience” after the Protestant Reformation (Fuller 2010)—has only increased, as the internet empowers the modestly educated layperson to find a “second opinion” on virtually any topic of academic concern. In this respect, progress in the development of smart search engines could easily put the cautious, even-handed, “value-neutral” academic out of business. More difficult to automate is a consistent style of response across a broad range of issues that marks the autonomy of the public intellectual voice. We are much more familiar with the style of, say, Voltaire or Sartre than with the substance of what they said—and this is not because they did not say substantive, often rather unexpected, things. But their style marked them as thinking through things for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others. From that point of view, academic discourse can look like bad acting, where the presence of a script is all too evident in the performance. And here I mean not the literal presence of the written text—which is bad enough—but the academic's tendency to declare her reliance on others' work too loudly like a proud ventriloquist's dummy. The proper term for this stance is “normal science” (Kuhn 1970). It makes for a poor reading and listening experience.Thus, the rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums, relatively scarce access to which is matched by a large appreciative audience. This has meant that, for quite a while now, academics have had to compete with such “media elites” as professional writers, journalists, and other “celebrities” for prime-time television exposure (Debray 1981). Chomsky, Dawkins and Ferguson have risen to the challenge, each in his own way. Against this backdrop, Welsh's apparent satisfaction with academics simply providing Habermas-style “resources” for citizen deliberation appears profoundly unambitious. At the same time, though, given the erosion of the academic's intellectual autonomy in our time, treating one's own words as bottled messages may offer prudent career advice for people unsure of who will be writing their next paycheck. But Welsh does not seem to want to argue from such a position of abject weakness. In that case, he needs to come to grips more directly with the cognitive significance of entertainment as a modus operandi in public intellectual life—not just now but perhaps always.“Entertainment” is an early seventeenth-century English coinage designed to capture an abstract sense of tenancy, as in the case of the king who keeps a poet or playwright on retainer solely for purposes of amusement but whose proximity ends up exerting influence over his political judgment. It was just this sense of the term that had led Plato to regard the performing arts as potentially subversive of good governance. Moreover, as Adriano Shaplin (2009) has recently dramatized, Hobbes shared similar suspicions about the English court's fascination with the theatricality of experimental demonstrations, the details of which form the basis of the most influential monograph in the historical sociology of science in recent times (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The fear evoked—or opportunity afforded—by entertainment is that after the final curtain is drawn, the audience might themselves continue acting in the spirit of the performance they had observed, effectively turning “real life” into an extension of the stage or, as Hobbes feared, the lab. It was precisely to decrease the likelihood of this happening that Aristotle stressed the cathartic function of the well-formed play: the most artful way to highlight drama's fictional character is to present its action as completely self-contained, which means that by the end all the plotlines have been resolved. Without such resolution, the line between fact and fiction may be easily blurred in an imaginatively inflamed audience. From that standpoint, the public intellectual clearly aims to violate Aristotle's strictures on good drama by wishing her brand of entertainment to outlast the experience of the actual performance so as to carry over as a motive force in the audience members once they have left the theater.My sense of entertainment's intellectually empowering character goes very much against the grain of Neil Postman's (1985) influential demonization of its alleged narcotic effects. To be sure, Postman was fixated on television, which he understood as Marshall McLuhan's absorbing yet noninteractive “cool” medium that, in Brave New World fashion, effectively sucked the life out of its viewers, a process that had been recently sensationalized by David Cronenberg in the film Videodrome (1983). But rather than the vampire, Postman might have considered the virus as the model of entertainment's modus operandi, whereby the host is not so much annihilated as simply contaminated by the guest organism. This then gets us back to the problem that originally concerned Plato, one which Antoine Artaud's (1958) “theatre of cruelty” converted into a virtue: it is not that the poets send the audience into a dream state but that the audience might enact those dreams in “real life.” The normative limits of “reality television” provide an interesting contemporary benchmark on this issue. Whereas television producers and audiences are enthusiastic about Dragons' Den styled programs (called Shark Tank in the United States) that cast entrepreneurship as a talent competition, similarly styled proposals to stage political elections have been met with the sort of disapproval that would have pleased Plato (see, e.g., Firth 2009).Against this backdrop, Welsh gets my critique of Dewey exactly wrong. Of course, Dewey was trying to be a public intellectual. In fact, the monumental level of his failure reflects the tremendous effort he put into the task. But in the end, his approach to the task was profoundly nonentertaining. He simply tried to apply his ideas without considering how the medium might affect the message. By nearly all accounts, Dewey's many public appearances and popular books over a very long career were watered down versions of the distractedly presented abstractions that marked his more technical performances. He was and is boring. Although Dewey saw the classroom as the gateway to a more democratic society, his real talent lay in taking advantage of the classroom's artificially well-bounded character to treat it as a laboratory for generating democratic sentiments. While hardly a trivial achievement, like many other laboratory-based experiments, it did not generalize. Perhaps Dewey's best chance in the public intellectual sweepstakes was taken by his followers behind the so-called forum movement, which in interwar America aimed to institutionalize deliberative democracy in the form of discussion groups in local churches, clubs, union halls, and community centers. William Keith (2007) has provided a sophisticated, critically sympathetic account of this phenomenon, which attracted the support of the reformist wing of the emerging speech communication scholarly community, who believed that in an era of mass democracy, the paramount concern of public discourse should focus on how to forge a purposeful consensus. In that context, they found classical debate practices inappropriately combative and elitist and therefore not suited to this purpose.However, the forum movement failed for reasons that would have been obvious to Dewey's nemesis, Walter Lippmann, journalism's answer to Plato. Dewey had imagined that the twentieth century would bring an end to the hereditary elites who had inhibited the populace from realizing their potential for self-governance. In many respects, the debate culture was an atavism of that predemocratic past in its casting of intellectual exchange as a confrontation of rhetorical virtuosos, observed admiringly by a mass audience. The big worry shared by Dewey and Lippmann as they debated in books and the pages of The New Republic in the 1920s was that the rise of broadcast media, especially radio, would facilitate the replacement of those old elites with a new, media-savvy breed of demagoguery that by the 1930s had come to be associated with fascist rhetoric (Schudson 2008). In this context, the forum movement was a collectively self-applied immunization strategy, as social peers—often neighbors—helped each other articulate their beliefs and desires, ideally in a way that enabled them to have a common voice in the face of the various claims increasingly pressed on them by competing ideologues and, for that matter, advertisers.Nevertheless, Keith (2007) concludes that the forum movement fell afoul of market-driven entertainment imperatives, as had such nineteenth-century precursors as the lyceum movement, which popularized New England transcendentalism, and the Chautauqua movement, which effectively spawned a self-improvement industry that has only grown with time. Big-name speakers were booked to draw large audiences, but then what passed for “discussion” was either respectful “Q&A” sessions or uncritical enthusiasm. In neither case was the original egalitarian and grassroots spirit of the movement truly maintained, a fatal structural deformation, considering the forum movement's aims. With hindsight we can say that the movement's boosters underestimated the extent to which people's beliefs and desires are constructed rather than discovered, especially once they enter relatively neutral zones of articulation. In other words, Dewey's followers were wrong to presume that some innate sense of collective reason came to light once external barriers were removed. Rather, it may be that the very possibility of “collective” thought and action is predicated on the open-ended character of individuals' ends. In short, people are by nature biddable.Lippmann took that prospect as a practical proposition, which is why he called for state licensing of commercial advertising even before Bernays (1928), the bible of modern public relations, had adumbrated advertising's likely long-term significance to “engineer consent.” Whatever else one might say about Lippmann, he took the normative character of the public intellectual's task seriously—albeit understood as guardian of the public interest, indeed often against the public's own instincts. While I do not share Lippmann's construal of the public intellectual's task, it is one that came to grips with the power of entertainment, an important of legacy of which was his own persona as the calming presence of the all-knowing insider. In contrast, the other successful twentieth-century U.S. public intellectual that I cite in “The Public Intellectual as Agent of Justice” (2006), Reinhold Niebuhr, played to the entertainment function more directly by extending the prophetic strain of Christian preaching into a call to arms to fight both poverty at home and communism abroad. His righteous politicized persona has been arguably—and perhaps even self-consciously—reinvented for a by chap. an of Welsh's to with the and is the of Slavoj Žižek as an intellectual for understanding the political position of the The not in the sort of light that Žižek which is simply a play of to scholars as members of society are in the of yet by they are to of which taken an to in many “all both and Welsh Žižek to the end, for and concludes that this is and in practice a of then for scholars to to with the that from a that with a position that is at once in but not of But this is no more than a of the of and, more the experience of that dubbed the of in modern from this is is is Welsh's of Žižek for these while a and clearly very well educated in and is not a in Welsh's Žižek does not hold a academic he and is a and the of academic life—not to with 2008). all of his while relatively academic in are through commercial with old New This means that his work is for its of on the basis of academic which of of and However, over time such has a as Žižek with his which in turn reflects a between and In short, Žižek the people Welsh claims to be is that were Žižek to apply his own of he would not himself in the position of the in the of but rather the public intellectual in the of Indeed, Žižek has been with I to by academics, with a in the public intellectual the problem of academics the of public intellectuals is even than that of academics trying to into the public intellectual

In my article, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism Between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency,” I argue that academic desire is inherently frustrated by motives in tension with each other (2012). As rhetoric scholars, we are supposed to explore what we find politically interesting or important by isolating a chosen element of the political in order to perform a systematic study of that element and generate some insight about it. Yet graduate students quickly learn that moral fervor and political commitment are not the same thing as studying something that they care about. And this moment of revelation is no less true for a partisan in the throws of a political campaign than it is for an academic shut away in an archive. For example, political campaign operatives charged with polling a subset of the electorate are not, in the act of designing and performing the poll, acting as political operatives. Rather, in their role as pollsters, they must resist their own wishes or expectations or they will not actually be of any service to their campaign or party. Instead, to be of service, they must apply methods that are intended to return results that would be valuable to anyone who might have access to them. This is why campaigns hide their internal polls from both the public and competing campaigns. They do not want either the public or competing campaigns to know what they have learned precisely because such malleable knowledge could be applied by others in ways that might thwart their own campaign's strategy.Nevertheless, the difference between a political campaign's internal polling operation and an academic should be clear. Like internal pollsters, academics engage in systematic study in order to produce results that anyone could potentially use. However, unlike pollsters, academics do not keep the results of their research hidden away for partisan advantage but rather make those results public because their research is intended to serve the interests of anyone who might engage the products of their analysis. Like internal pollsters, however, academics also do not need to be understood as “value-neutral.” Of course they aren't. They will have chosen what they want to study because they suspect that an inadequate understanding of some element of reality may be the cause of problems that they hope improved understanding might somehow contribute to ameliorating. Now, if an academic fails to deliver a product that is of use to anyone because it takes a form that no one can figure out how to use, and use in a relatively sophisticated way, then the academic might be considered to have failed. She will have failed insofar as she had hoped that improved understanding might potentially aid those directly involved in addressing the problem.Might we say that academics work amid a broader competition to enact particular policies, just as internal campaign pollsters work amid those directly competing to win elections? Hence, are not both academics and internal campaign pollsters “in” the contest but not “of” the contest? Might we say that faithful service to either of the two demands it? In Slavoj Žižek's language (following Lacan), attempting to cut the corner, to directly engage in the contest, would be an example of what he calls “giving way” on one's “desire” (1989, 117–18). In the language of my prior article, it is an example of refusing the challenge that constitutes the antagonism, in this case, the antagonism between reflection and action that constitutes the academic subject position. Recall, however, that antagonism does not mean simple opposition. Rather, it points to a state of affairs in which an ideology or subject position unavoidably contains elements that are in tension. And “tension” is the right word because it can mean both pressing together and pulling apart. Antagonism, in Žižek's sense, means inseparability paired with incommensurability (to be a politically effective internal campaign pollster one must forswear politics). At his most esoteric, Žižek writes that antagonisms do not exist in what he calls “the real” (which can mean something like reality in the absence of symbols), because antagonisms are products of language (2005, 249–54). No word or set of words can say everything, and what is left unsaid in any moment will continue to torment what is said, creating the experience of antagonism—or an anxiety-producing need to say two different things at the same time (1991, 154; 1989, 21, 43, 49; 1994, 21, 26). Yet, while both things must be said, those two things, within language, always manifest as in tension with each other (in the world but not of the world, wholly God and wholly man, the mysteries of the sublime).Effacing an antagonism by reducing the saying of one thing to the saying of another—and acting as if it “resolves” the antagonism—entails giving way on one's desire. It is the construction of a cheap substitute when what is needed is not exactly the real thing itself, but the pursuit of the real thing. Hence, the pursuit of the real thing entails refusing to take a shortcut to one's desire (1989, 117–18; 1993, 60). The very idea of an “academic as public intellectual” is just such a shortcut. In it's material manifestation, it is an unstable, unsatisfying compromise that is wholly committed to neither reflection nor action. And, because it is neither one nor the other, it also cannot be both.For example, consider Fuller's account of the plight of the public intellectual. First, he explains that the “rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums.” In order to reclaim their allegedly rightful place in public discourse, Fuller argues that academics need to more carefully consider what it takes “to compete with such ‘media elites’ as professional writers, journalists, and other ‘celebrities’ for prime-time television exposure.” And what it takes, he says, is the careful cultivation of a persona that keeps some of the affectations of the academic yet is entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. Walter Lippmann, Fuller argues, is an especially good model for aspiring academics as public intellectuals because, even though he was not primarily an academic in the institutional sense of the word, he nevertheless played the part. He cultivated the public persona of “the calming presence of an all-knowing insider” as his authorizing—and entertaining—hook or gimmick, which permitted him to exercise a high degree of individual political agency. In contrast, John Dewey's problem, according to Fuller, was that he remained too singularly focused on maximizing effective citizen political participation, through various forum movements and improved public education, to the detriment of maximizing the reach of his own political voice. Thus, while Dewey may have thought of himself as something like what we call a public intellectual, he actually was not one in Fuller's sense of the word because either Dewey refused to perform a broadly entertaining persona or was simply, as a matter of temperament, not amusing or entertaining enough to effectively playact the role of the wise, trustworthy, plain-spoken professor for a mass audience.This is the same advice Stephen Hartnett gives academics who aspire to be public intellectuals. They must, as I noted in the prior article, learn to “speak clearly and look authoritative” while offering “mass-media-shaped tidbits” (2010, 81–83). The academic as public intellectual must look authoritative (play the part of an academic) while saying things that could just as well be said by a celebrity guest. The bait-and-switch quality of the academic playing the role of an academic on TV is apparent in a number of those whom Fuller identifies as public intellectual “exemplars,” particularly Noam Chomsky, Niall Ferguson, and Cornel West. Chomsky's “public intellectual” work, for example, bears only a passing resemblance to the academic research for which he is known. Hence, whatever a public audience might get from Chomsky's books about whatever the current outrage is, they should not be afforded special attention due to his renown as a professor of linguistics. Ferguson's August 2012 cover story in Newsweek arguing against the reelection of Barack Obama is a particularly egregious example of this bait-and-switch technique: he lures the audience in with the promise of rigorous academic intelligence but instead writes a deceptive account of the Affordable Care Act; no one expects the Harvard professor to be plainly dishonest (Ferguson 2012; Krugman 2012). Cornel West, the former Harvard professor who has cultivated what Fuller calls a “righteous politicized persona,” has definitely been adept at competing for the media spotlight, but it is not at all clear that his current persona promotes anything resembling what an academic is supposedly uniquely equipped to offer public discourse—namely, some sort of intellectual contribution. Together, all three become caricatures in line with the worst of what the public believes about academics—that they are unstable ideologues who pursue political agendas under the auspices of higher education.Each of them also fulfills Fuller's academic-as-public-intellectual obligation “to exploit the distinctive communicative resources afforded by all the media.” What he means by this, here and elsewhere, is that academics who want to be public intellectuals have to not only be ready with but must also promote the nickel, fifty-cent, and ten-dollar version of their “ideas” in order to maximize each idea's public reach, appeal, and effectiveness. Yet how different is the nickel version of any intellectual idea from what many other similarly minded commentators, politicians, or protestors are already saying? Is the nickel version of Chomsky much different than what is printed on T-shirts outside of World Trade Organization meetings? And, in the case of Chomsky, does his actual academic expertise intellectually ground those slogans? And how is the talk radio or morning television version of any idea ever an “intellectual” contribution to public discourse? All that is left of the intellectual is the wise or iconoclastic professor persona cultivated by the professor doing the speaking; recall the number of conservative “thinkers” on television who enact their thoughtfulness by their choice in neckwear (always a bowtie).Is Fuller not recommending something like an ironic inversion of the classic advertising line “I'm not really a doctor, but I play one on TV,” except now the professor says, “I am really a professor but, until the next commercial break, I'm just going to play one on TV”? Just as celebrities trade on their stardom to play the game of political winning and losing, academics as public intellectuals ought to trade on their scholarly persona. In other words, one plays the part of the academic intellectual but must not supply what the persona promises to deliver. And this, Fuller says, is what it means for academics as public intellectuals to adopt a style in the tradition of Voltaire and Sartre, “marked” as “thinking things through for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others”? And it therefore follows, then, in a line Fuller likes to repeat, that it is the traditional academic who is little more than “a proud ventriloquist's dummy” (2005, 100)?Yet perhaps the deeper problem is bound up with idea that the spirit of broader academic arguments or intellectual syntheses continues to live inside their stripped-down nickel versions. However, as I argued in the earlier article, every academic conclusion drawn from however rigorous or voluminous the research will necessarily (should it ever come into contact with public discourse) be reduced to a simplified metaphor or simplifying shorthand term (Welsh 2012, 17). Still, in its simplified form, it is never simply a short or a nutshell version. Rather, it is a discursive resource in its own right that becomes immediately detachable (and is detached) from its origins and takes on new and unanticipated forms, which is to say that it immediately becomes available for diverse, often opposing forms of appropriation.Consider, for example, the term “social capital” that emerged among Dewey and his followers at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly as discussed by the political scientist James Farr (2004). “Social capital,” a term that continues to be used today among certain liberals as well as conservatives, tends to be understood as a call to look for cultural, educational, institutional, and economic “investments” that might support integrated and healthy communities. At its best, it frames social life in morally rich terms of connectedness and interdependence, taking the place of morally debilitating visions of “survival of the fittest” or “winner take all.” Farr argues that that the term's continued resonance has to do with the artistic twist it gives to common words and meanings. Yet it offers more than momentary delight. It invokes a revised world with modified priorities. It is morally suggestive and a richly heuristic play on words.Hence, people can do with it something very much like what Robert Putnam (1995) suggested in his widely read article “Bowling Alone” and invest in community groups and gatherings, treating social connections as a form of capital requiring steady investment. And certain kinds of conservatives can also use the term to rationalize cohesive communities—built on the exclusion of outsiders. At the same time, opponents of social capital in either of these senses could reframe the term in order to recommend forms of community ruled by the demands of capital accumulation. Efforts at building social capital in either of the two prior senses could be cast as impeding the production of the “real” social capital, which such opponents might argue is the economic output of the members of a society. Time spent at “social clubs” and “off the job” could be presented in terms of lost economic growth or diminished hard capital, the same capital needed to pay for the social “get-togethers.” Money doesn't grow on trees, you get what you pay for, there is no such thing as a free lunch.More economically progressive uses of the term “social capital,” others could say, is just code for “socialism” (a word that has a constant presence in American political discourse, complete with images of Stalin), a tactic designed to scare citizens away from progressive reforms. All of these arguments are already in place, ready to be marshaled into service should the term “social capital” begin to seriously challenge prevailing ways of speaking in any particular way. It could even be that those most sympathetic to the diverse uses to which the term can be put should argue for setting it aside because it is simply too fraught with difficulty. Is there any other two-word combination that draws attention to the dominant political and economic tension of the twentieth century more than “social capital”? Could there be?Fuller's argument, however, is that academics can, and must try to, actively “control the public reception” of their messages. Yet once an academic's “message” is reduced to a central metaphor, control is already lost. And, in addition to it no longer being in any respect a complicating “intellectual” message or discourse, in that same moment everyone is granted the freedom to pick it up and use it quite differently than intended—all the while continuing to tout the authority of its academic provenance. Thus, once one moves from academic discourse to public discourse, the scholarly product becomes a rhetoric, and once it becomes a rhetoric it becomes just one more rhetorical pivot point susceptible to leveraging competing policies. It becomes what C. Wright Mills called a part of the sociological imagination (2000, 4–5, 48, 71).However, is this not precisely the place where rhetorical scholarship becomes most relevant to public affairs? Any rhetorical analysis or critique worthy of the name must be rooted in the recognition that private terms are more likely to become public rhetorics when diverse groups of people can imagine using them in pursuit of a wide variety of goals. Hence, there is no teacher of rhetoric that has ever claimed to have found the political message that needed to get out. Rather, as Fuller himself argues in The Intellectual, the earliest teachers of what we tend to think of as rhetoric, the Sophists (whom Fuller also refers to as the first public intellectuals), did not advance particular ideas but, instead, offered training in using ideas as rhetorical instruments in light of a student's aims (2005, 7). Fuller argues that “the sophists never understood themselves as ‘idea merchants,’ as one might characterize think-tank dwellers today or, in more elevated tones[,] … Voltaire.” “No,” Fuller clarifies, “the sophists were purveyors of certain skills and perhaps even tools” (2005, 9). Moreover, Fuller explains how “the sophists mainly wanted to help clients win lawsuits and sway public opinion, to take greater control of their fate, as befits citizens in a democracy” (2005, 9). My argument is that rhetoric scholars should see themselves in just this way—as devoted to understanding public discourse, which entails weighing the shifting and unpredictable assets and liabilities of the wide range of rhetorical resources. By seeing themselves in such a light, they provide a service to all citizens, activists, and politicians engaged in unpredictable and constantly evolving rhetorical contests for power (Welsh 2013).Perhaps the key distinction here concerns whose agency academics should be interested in promoting. Fuller says that we are doing a bad job if we are not constantly thinking about how to win support for our own particular visions of what is good or just—the academic thus needs to be a political campaign's internal pollster, strategist, and messenger all in one. Hence, Fuller is arguing that Dewey's problem was that Dewey did not see his role as either or for inherently malleable and a quality of that Dewey clearly Rather, like the Dewey remained as a and to the political agency of even if that not maximizing his Yet, the that the Dewey had on and I think we can say he also did well for he refused to the antagonism that academic desire did not way on it.

Research has noted an increase in the use of assessed group projects across disciplines in institutions of higher learning. Consequently, this study investigates the prompt for an assessed group case-study project in a sophomore business module in order to provide lecturers with tools and techniques for probing a prompt document. The authors use a task-analysis framework developed for task-based language teaching to examine the project’s requirements and chain of integrated tasks. The study shows that the project prompt was dense and complicated and the component tasks were highly interactive and complex. Further, the study reveals that group case-study projects can play an important role in developing the team skills needed for future real-life projects.

In this essay, I develop a pedagogical stance called the “free exercise of rhetoric” as a way to approach teaching and student writing at the intersection of LGBT and religious discourses. Through this stance, I work with students’ personal commitments and build their rhetorical competence using a process that involves encountering uncommon arguments, valuing misreading, and embracing unpredictability. I suggest the free exercise of rhetoric as a pedagogical option for taking religion seriously as a topic and identity in writing classrooms, but one that does not start from students’ personal experience with religion.

Through an examination of four current trends in composition instruction, this article presents a new lens for envisioning composition instruction that integrates the best aspects of the writing across the curriculum, genre-based curriculum approach, ecocomposition, and writing across communities theories of writing instruction. The "literacy landscape" proposed herein explicitly values the integration of student learning “incomes” within the composition classroom and derives from the author’s experience teaching within a large composition program that employed aspects of the genre-based curriculum, and both WAC approaches. The literacy landscape is envisioned to act both as a lens for imagining a more comprehensive approach to administering composition programs, as well as to teaching composition.

Once controversial or cutting-edge, freewriting has recently become “part of every writing teacher’s repertoire” (Bizzell and Herzberg in Elbow 393). On par with outlining or webbing, freewriting seems to be a go-to practice in a writing teacher’s tool kit. This downshift into uncritical acceptance presents an apt moment to reconsider how we implement freewriting practices in the college writing classroom. Toward this reexamination, this essay problematizes the pervasive assumption about freewriting that it is above all else easy, effortless, quick, and free from judgment, hesitation, and doubt . The essay suggests that this assumed ease remains one of the thorniest and obscured problems in the practice of classroom-based freewriting and hypothesizes that the mode required to freewrite is not necessarily natural or automatic for student writers, but rather requires training, conversation, and reorientation. In order for freewriting to be an effective means of stimulating critical and creative thinking, teachers of writing need to consider not only how we can add in analytical and reflective thinking about freewriting texts, but also how we can get students to do productive, questioning, and exploratory thinking within freewriting itself. Above all, facilitators of freewriting can benefit from assuming the difficulties of thinking through freewriting.

In this Retrospective, we revisit our 2007 College Composition and Communication article in order to clarify our primary argument, address some questions and critiques that have arisen, and consider anew the value of composition courses that study writing. We review our core argument that engaging students with the research and ideas of writing studies, building declarative and procedural knowledge of writing, improves learning transfer. Now, using the example of Jan Meyer and Ray Land’s notion of threshold concepts, we argue for the field to better name its knowledge and conceptions and to decide what portion is suitable for first-year students. We clarify the distinction between this broad underlying goal and our personal approaches to accomplishing it, emphasizing the diversity of approaches that have come to embody the study of writing in first-year composition. While maintaining that writing studies lacks recognition of itself as a field and of the value of its specialized knowledge to writing instruction, we revise our original argument to show how writing instructors from other fields and with other expertise can build familiarity with writing studies research without extensive, specialized study. Ultimately, we continue to advocate teaching our field’s knowledge in first-year composition, while expanding our sense both of how to prepare instructors to do so and of the value of such teaching.

As a teacher, writer, administrator, researcher, theorist and philosopher, Louise Wetherbee Phelps has contributed to the construction and design of the discipline of composition and rhetoric at all stages, from its foundation in the 1970s to the eclectic dwelling in which we reside today. Louise is shaping the future of the discipline as well, mentoring and educating the next generation of scholar-teachers. She is invested in teaching and committed to cultivating stimulating intellectual engagement in composition and rhetoric. Louise’s former students often refer to her as a matriarch of the field, recognizing that her work has been foundational and highly influential. She has worked to bring recognition to rhetoric, composition, and writing studies on a local, national, and international level in such efforts as creating a stand-alone undergraduate and doctoral program at Syracuse University and securing our status as a legitimate discipline. Recently retired after a career spanning more than 30 years at Syracuse University, Louise has yet to slow down. In fact, she might be busier now than ever before. This interview takes you on a tour of the multiple, converging pathways Louise has traveled throughout her career as well as the new pathways she is forging in retirement. She discusses her work as a consultant, professor, and writer as well as the state of writing studies in the U.S. and in international contexts. She also provides insight into what constitutes a scholarly identity and how we might understand more holistically our own academic work and the work of others.

Even as veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seek higher education, civilians tend to know little about war and military culture. While this lack of knowledge makes veterans’ adjustments more difficult, it has a more pernicious effect on civilians themselves, as it limits civilians’ ability to act as informed, responsible citizens before, during, and after war. Writing teachers can help ameliorate this problem by incorporating war writing into their syllabi. Accordingly, this review essay provides an overview of the civilian-military gap, reviews memoirs by Army veterans Shannon Meehan and Kayla Williams, and suggests pedagogical approaches to teaching war writing.

This program profile describes the motivation to create a “veteran friendly” course offered within the composition program at City College of San Francisco. The author provides a discussion of the course and considers the challenges and successes he has faced over the three years of teaching it.

In this article, I summarize an interview-based, qualitative research study conducted with ten Marine student veterans on their experiences with college composition courses, focusing particularly on the how the participants’ previous interactions with teaching, learning, and writing in the Marine Corps have impacted their perceptions and expectations of teaching, learning, and writing in the first-year composition classroom. Specifically, I focus on the way in which relevant conclusions from the study regarding Marine student veterans’ prior rhetorical knowledge and experiences complicate the novice-to-expert paradigm at work in many first-year composition courses. The piece concludes with suggestions for repurposing this paradigm to one that encourages faculty to make room for prior rhetorical knowledge while identifying areas where student veterans may need support.

This article explores the prospects for internationalizing the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, a degree that has gained considerable popularity in the United States in the past half century but has yet to gain much of a foothold in other countries. As part of this exploration, we describe the experiences of establishing the first low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Asia at City University of Hong Kong, explaining the justification for setting up such a program with reference to the history of teaching creative writing and the current conditions for literary writing in English in Asia and globally. We also reflect upon the processes of planning, curriculum design, and administrative negotiation and that went into setting up the program and report on feedback from the first cohort of students. The experience of setting up this program is used as the basis for raising a number of more general issues regarding the teaching of creative writing in English in international contexts.

This article discusses creativity within the classroom with a focus on creative writing. First, it reviews concepts of creativity in the educational literature and a previous study on how science teachers fostered “small c” creativity in their classrooms. Small-c creativity values the kind of thinking that produces new ideas in learners but is not necessarily historically important to any field or domain. It can be argued that when educators help their students excel at thinking creatively every day, it assists them in more frequently producing creative products. Using this theoretical lens, an analytical study framework was developed from a review of the literature stating that teachers who foster small-c creativity: (1) support divergent thinking; (2) accept learning artifacts that are novel; (3) nurture collaboration in which individual kinds of creativity are supported; (4) provide choices in what is an acceptable response; and (5) include lesson guidelines that enhance learning and self-confidence. Findings of the science study were applied to the writing classroom, as five poet-teachers were interviewed regarding their beliefs about small-c creativity. The themes that emerged within the teacher interviews are discussed. The piece concludes with recommendations for writing teachers geared to help them foster small-c creativity in their classrooms.

Teaching problem: Undergraduate research at the university level often focuses on the production of a traditional research paper, one with an academic orientation, often information heavy and analysis light, emphasizing the importance of secondary sources and documentation style over the process of inquiry. What approaches to undergraduate research would enable aspiring technical communicators to develop research skills that would better prepare them for success in a professional environment? Situating the case: The approaches described in this paper draw on the work of Mel Levine as presented in , in which he delineates several reasons why young people encounter problems when they enter professional environments: overly managed lives, no experience of delayed gratification, inability to think critically, limited knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses, and an expectation of stability in the so-called adult world. Levine claims that these problems can be addressed by helping students develop a sense of inner direction as opposed to direction from without, an understanding of how to think critically and apply knowledge, a willingness to build and refine skills over time, and competent writing and speaking skills. In addition, the approaches described in this paper draw on three well-established research traditions: mixed methods research, problem-based research, and action research. How this case was studied: This paper describes the experiences of using two approaches to teach Research in Technical and Scientific Communication at a mid-sized state university in Virginia. The material was collected informally over a period of six years of teaching the course-through observation, student feedback, and completed research reports. About the case: Research in Technical and Scientific Communication required students to produce a research report within the context of real-world inquiry, appropriately focused for a specific audience and purpose, using both primary and secondary sources, and including analysis as well as information. Two approaches were used. The Real Client approach required students to investigate a small-scale, real-world problem or need, which became the focus of a research report that could be submitted to a specific audience for a specific purpose, both identified by the student early in the research process. The Impact of Technology approach required students to consider the impact of technology on modern life, investigate a narrower topic within this broad topic, and prepare a report that could be published in the university magazine or student newspaper. Examples of strong and weak research reports illustrate which features of each approach worked well and which posed challenges. Overall, students responded well to both approaches, but found the Impact of Technology approach more congenial because it was more familiar to them than the Real Client approach. Nonetheless, with both approaches, but especially with the Real Client approach, students seemed reluctant to make necessary contacts, conduct in-depth interviews, and include well-developed analysis. They were more comfortable gathering information anonymously through secondary source material or online surveys, and presenting that information with a limited amount of analysis. Both approaches served to move students toward a more realistic understanding of the kind of research needed in professional environments. Conclusions: These approaches also addressed the concerns raised by Levine. The study was limited by its informal nature, with observations and conclusions resulting from a six-year period of informal experimentation and refinement, during which the requirements for the research report were continually redesigned to better address what students would need to be successful in a workplace.

Writing in and about Wikipedia encourages students to think about the outcomes of their writing and, by extension, changes the student/teacher relationship in pedagogically useful ways.

Other| December 01 2012 Embodying the Profession: John C. Hammerback-Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Friend Richard J. Jensen Richard J. Jensen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 707–716. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940633 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Richard J. Jensen; Embodying the Profession: John C. Hammerback-Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Friend. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 707–716. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940633 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. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Giorgio Agamben's The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath can be read as a radical rethinking of a traditional rhetorical category: ethos. This is not the ethos you learned in school. Rather than a mode of persuasion, Agamben argues that ethos is the distinguishing characteristic of human language as such. In this regard, its essential characteristic is the movement it enables between a “speaker and his language.” It is this ethical relationship—what Agamben calls the articulation of “life and language” (69)—that distinguishes human speech from birdsong, insect signals, and the roar of lions. “The decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that is to say, in the ethical relation established between a speaker and his language” (71).This doesn't put it quite strongly enough. Nor does it capture radicalness of Agamben's inquiry. Precisely speaking, Agamben is not concerned with the articulation of life and language—the linkage between the two established formally by ethos and enacted in the oath. Rather, to use one of his favorite phrases, Agamben is concerned with the zone of indistinction between life and language. Thus to the extent that ethos is the fundamental characteristic of human language, to the same extent humanity is constituted and set off from the animal kingdom by the fact that, alone among the animals, humans read their life in their language. Agamben writes, “Uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language…. He is the living being whose language places his life in question” (69, emphasis his). This is a radical revision of ethos: by moving freely between the two poles of the ancient concept (language and life) and reading each pole within the other, Agamben has turned ethos into a zone of indistinction that explains what it binds together: the specificity of human language and the never-ending task of anthropogenesis.To better understand this zone of indistinction, Agamben turns to an archaeology of the oath. This makes good sense. In both legal and religious contexts, the oath is the genre par excellence for guaranteeing the relation of life and language. In the most conventional sense possible, to swear an oath is to verify the correlation of deeds and words, life and language. As Agamben puts it, the oath “seems” to guarantee the “truth or effectiveness” of a proposition (5). For this reason, the oath has thrived in contexts (law and religion most prominently) where questions of truth are paramount. Yet the conventional reading of the oath as a tool for articulating words and deeds is clearly not sufficient for Agamben. To render life and language indistinguishable (not simply linkable), the oath must be more than a rhetorical technique. In its capacity to bind words and deeds together, it must be understood as archetypal of language as such. For Agamben, therefore, an oath is not one genre among many; it is the essence of language, its purest manifestation and a privileged window into its ultimate conceit. Agamben thus approaches the oath not as it exists in legal/religious contexts but as something more fundamental. In fact, his entire methodology—his archaeology—is designed precisely to foreground the fundamental indistinction of language and oath.Agamben's archaeology must not be confused with Foucault's. Eschewing transcendental categories like origin or totality, Foucault's archaeologist pursues the endless accumulation of historical statements. On this model, the archaeologist does not ask where these statements began, what motivated them, or what drove them to appear when they did. She resists every temptation to look beyond the statement to something deeper, more fundamental, or more originary than the simple historical fact of its appearance. In the sharpest of contrasts, Agamben's archaeologist purses an “arche” that is beyond all historical statements. Following philologist Georges Dumézil (who was also influential for Foucault), Agamben argues that the goal of archaeology is the “furthest fringe of ultra-history” (9). His example is the so-called Indo-European language, the entirely hypothetical language from which a great variety of historical languages supposedly sprung. His conceit is that the examination of historical statements allows the archaeologist to work backward from history to ultra-history, from specific statements to a “force operating in history” (10) to the “otherwise inaccessible stages of the history of social institutions” (9). The distance between the two archaeologies might be measured by the mathematical metaphors used to describe them. Foucault's archaeology is grounded in addition; for him the fundamental archaeological task is accumulation.1 For Agamben, on the other hand, the archaeologist requires an “algorithm,” a means of arranging historical statements into a formula that produces something more than the sum of its parts (9).In the Sacrament of Language, Agamben uses his algorithm to work backward from a variety of classical meditations on the oath (Philo and Cicero are prominent) to what he calls an originary “experience of language” (53). This experience, much like the Indo-European language, “is something that is necessarily presupposed as having happened but that cannot be hypostatized into an event in a chronology” (11). What is this “pure” experience of language (53)? Here we need to follow Agamben into the details. His first clue that the historical career of the oath might bear witness to the pure experience of language is grounded in the observation that the name of God is a recurrent (even required) aspect of the oath (e.g., “I swear by God …”). To make sense of this formulaic requirement, Agamben turns to the first-century philosopher Philo Judeaus. In his analysis of a lengthy portion of the Legum allegoriae, Agamben stresses the ambiguous function of the name of God within the formula of the oath: “It is completely impossible to tell if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God” (22). This indeterminacy between the oath and name of God is important to Agamben, and he returns to this fundamental lesson from Philo at critical points throughout the book (48, 51).The indistinction between the oath and the name of God prompts Agamben to turn to Nietzsche's one-time teacher, the German philologist Hermann Usener. Now known for his concept of momentary gods, Usener argued that every name of the gods was originally the name of an action or a brief event. Thus there were gods named after harvest, tilling, plowing, and so forth. So understood, there is no distance between the name of a god and activities in the world; the name of a given god was the activity and the activity was the name of the god (46). This, we might say, is the ultimate instantiation of ethos: there is here no distance between life and language. Indeed, it is precisely the collapsing of the distance (the indistinction) between words and things that constitutes the oath as an index to an originary experience of language. “Here we have something like the foundation or originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language.” Thus, the name of God, essential to the formulaic structure of the oath, attests to the indistinction that envelops words and deeds, the oath and language as such. The name of God “is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath” (46).The simple act of nomination, then, points to an original experience of language. On this score, the essential characteristic of nomination is the fact that, in the act of naming, words and deeds are performatively related. “As in the oath, the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and things” (49). At this point, Agamben's mode of argument resembles nothing so much as Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” As Nietzsche explains in this 1873 essay, originally speaking, language was neither denotative nor semantic. Rather, all words were originally interjections, names imposed on events by the creative whim of the “intuitive man” (who would soon become the “overman”). For Nietzsche (and Agamben), in the original act of naming, words and things were related only by the aesthetic preferences of the strong; it was only as the weak repeated the original interjections of the strong that words fell into the realm of semantics, representation, and meaning.2 It is for this reason, Agamben argues, that categories long central to the understanding of language (meaning, representation, and denotation) were not part of the original (performative) experience of language. He even suggests that one day the experience of language might once more escape the paradigm of representation: “The distinction between sense and denotation, which is perhaps not, as we have been accustomed to believe, an original and eternal characteristic of human language but a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)” (55). Thus does Agamben revise the speech act theory of performatives. Owing to their nonrepresentational semiotics, performatives point to the original experience of language. “They represent in language a remnant of a stage … in which the connection between words and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense that, as in the oath, the verbal act brings being into truth” (55). At this point we can begin to see Agamben's radical revision of ethos. As he makes the category central to the experience of language, he asks us to remove it from the realm of representation in which it functions as a technique a speaker might deploy to guarantee the truth of her words. Rather, Agamben asks us to consider ethos performatively, to see it as indistinguishable from an original experience of language.Much like Nietzsche's, Agamben's tale is one of degeneration. Once the original performative experience of language was lost (and the paradigm of representation took over), possibilities of truth and falsehood emerged. In the space that now existed between words and things, the space that had been collapsed in the act of naming and in the oath, semantics took the place of performance. It was now the question of meaning that guaranteed the articulation of life and language. But meaning, complicated as it is by rhetoric, proved an untrustworthy linkage. Thus it seemed that falsehood was a possibility written into the experience of language as such. For this reason Agamben argues that it was only after the original experience of language had been lost that law and religion—the two historical guardians of the oath—sprang up to guarantee the relation between language and life. No longer an integral part of language itself, the linkage between words and deeds needed to be vouched for by human institutions and an ever-proliferating list of blessings/curses attached to the oath. Agamben returns to this point time and again, suggesting that it is deeply significant for him. Over and again, he insists on the primacy of an experience of language from which followed a number of cultural institutions: “And it is in the attempt to check this split in the experience of language that law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (58).Agamben cares about more than the birth of law and religion. On a more fundamental level, in the “split in the experience of language” Agamben reads the birth of anthropogenesis. That is, because humanity is the animal that reads itself in its language, the introduction of space between words and things provoked an existential crisis from which we have not recovered. “Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being” (11). This is why Agamben considers The Sacrament of Language to be a continuation of Homo Sacer. Agamben opened (and closed) Homo Sacer with a quotation from Foucault: “Modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”3 He ends The Sacrament of Language with the same quotation, adding this comment: “So also is he the living being whose language places his life in question. These two definitions are, in fact, inseparable and constitutively dependent on each other” (69, emphasis his). In other words, if in the original volume Agamben stressed the political production of bare life, Agamben now argues that bare life and language are structurally related.4 Indeed—and this may be his strongest claim—Agamben now argues that bare life must itself be considered a product of language. From the perspective of Agamben's oeuvre, then, we must consider Homo Sacer and The Sacrament of Language as symmetrical studies: they chart the construction of bare life from political and linguistic origins respectively. From the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the revision of ethos must now be considered complete: if Agamben can posit ethos as the fundamental category of language, it is because language itself creates the (bare) life to which it is continuously annexed.Now, truth be told, Agamben only once characterizes his inquiry in terms of ethos (on page 68). I've framed the entire inquiry in such terms to foreground the fact that, despite the difficulty of the philosophical prose, and despite the absence of what might be thought of as a rhetorical cast of mind, The Sacrament of Language is a book that will command the interest of readers of this journal. It is book that takes canonical ideas and concepts, reads them in creative ways, and produces results that are provocative by any measure. At this moment in rhetorical studies, a moment marked by a renewed concern in nonhuman rhetorics, animal rhetorics, and the space of the speaking subject vis-à-vis language, The Sacrament of Language may prove itself an invaluable tool for rethinking rhetoric's relationship to animals, humanity, and language.I'd like to register only one qualification. Briefly put, I fear Agamben may confuse articulation and indistinction. More precisely, he tends to read indistinction where a more nuanced reader might see only articulation. A few examples. In his reading of Philo, Agamben concludes that “it is completely impossible to decide if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God.” This is not true. For Philo, the fact that God's words are oaths is a “corollary” deduced from the primary fact of his “sure strength” (20). Philo is certainly articulating the oath and God, but they remain distinct: one is a corollary of another. Similar objections might be leveled against Agamben's equation of law and curse (38) and the various equations of the oath with blasphemy (39), promises (27), or perjury (7). Just because there is a mutually constitutive (even symbiotic) relationship between these concepts (and Agamben is at his best demonstrating these links) does not mean that they occupy a zone of indistinction.My concern is not limited to The Sacrament of Language. Readers of Agamben know that zones of indistinction are absolutely central to the whole of his work. I could point to the zones of indistinction he posits in Homo Sacer between man and animal, law and fact, or, ultimately, life and politics.5 Or I could point to the indistinction between anomie and order that permeates his State of Exception.6 In all cases, Agamben's work relies on the careful, meticulous, and complete erasing of boundaries. Agamben reads free movement, indeterminacy, and indistinction where others have read particular forms of correlation. At times, this indistinction is grounded in readings of obscure (Philo, Usener) or extreme (the Nazi documents that circulate in the closing section of Homo Sacer) texts that may (or may not) be sufficient to establish the indistinction he needs. Near the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben makes his commitment to zones of indistinction explicit: “It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, the difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.”7 Whether or not Agamben is correct that zones of indistinction must become a central category of our political thinking, I'd like to suggest that they must be central to our evaluation and uptake of Agamben himself. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether or not the zones of indistinction that punctuate his work at regular intervals are justified by the evidence he presents. My hunch is that some of them are and some of them are not. Indeed, zones of indistinction are the great genius and great liability of Agamben's thought: by moving freely between historically distinct ideas, by treating mutually constitutive concepts as if they were indistinguishable, Agamben enables us to ask profound questions that cut to the heart of our tradition. There is no denying this is important work. But, by the same measure, these questions only obtain because what might be called a consistent habit of (mis)reading indistinction for articulation. Whether one finds such work theoretically provocative (which it is) or historically slippery (which it is) is ultimately a question of faith.

This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by manythousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. Weseek to understand more clearly through this conversation how culture and rhetorical tradition help shape the way we teach writing.

This article describes the rationale and efficacy of a graduate-level teaching module providing loosely structured practice with real archives. Introducing early career scholarsto archival methods changed their beliefs about knowledge, research, teaching, and their discipline(s). This case study suggests that archives can be productive training spacesfor all writing studies researchers.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

This November issue of RTE once again contains the Annual Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English, available only here, on the NCTE website.

This article examines the ways in which a multimodal text—a YouTube video on globalization and business—was mediated in two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms, and how these mediations shaped the instructor’s and her students’ meaning-making in specific ways. I first explore the complex multimodal discourses involved with this particular video and present my own reading of it. In addressing the instructor’s and students’ engagements with this video, I adopt a mediated discourse analysis approach to examine their classroom discourses that interact with the social circulation of a globalization discourse featured in this multimodal text. A conversation with the participating instructor, who articulates several issues including concerns about the possible politicization of her classroom if certain approaches to texts are used, is also presented and used to examine her subsequent approach with her students in the second class. I discuss the ways in which social actors take up discourses differently, and conclude by exploring the possible classroom practices that can address an increasingly multimodal curriculum.

Although emotions are an important facet of teaching and learning in all classes, emotional literacy plays an especially significant role in classes that engage critically with difference. My article redefines and theorizes critical emotional literacy, proposing that we understand it as a social practice that must be developed not only by means of analytical strategies, but also by means of contemplative pedagogy. Addressing the nature of attention and the embodied experience of emotion is crucial if we are to cultivate the emotional literacy necessary for ongoing critical engagement with difference.

“In the pregnant composition teacher we see a dangerously stacked set of circumstances… Enclosed in a body that far exceeds her control, she is a microcosm for the larger system in which she must teach.”

This article examines the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project’s challenge and legacy to scholars seeking to create an FWP-inspired project today. It explores how scholars in various disciplines engaged in the “public turn,” which has contributed to university-community research and teaching projects, can gain perspective and insight from learning about the FWP’s goals and accomplishments. The article focuses on the FWP’s pluralistic vision of national identity, which led national FWP officials to examine American diversity in encyclopedic guidebooks and through oral history, ethnic, and folklore studies. By exploring why the work of the FWP was ignored for a long time and how its vision and work gradually reemerged, I seek not only to provide a history of the FWPs reputation but also to shed light on the opportunities and responsibilities the FWP offers to current efforts to create new FWP-like projects for a new time.

Preface Personal Prologue Chapter 1: Introduction: Examining Crisis, Laurie MacGillivray and Devon Brenner Commentator Introductions, Tracy Sweeney (Early Career Teacher), Jane Fung (Veteran Teacher) and Elizabeth Moje (Teacher Educator) Part I: Reading and Writing in Times of Crisis Chapter 2: Making Contact in Times of Crisis: Literacy Practices in a Post-Katrina World, April Whatley Bedford and Devon Brenner Chapter 3: Hallelujah! Bible-based Literacy Practices of Children Living in a Homeless Shelter, Laurie MacGillivray Chapter 4: Reactions to Divorce: Communication and Child Writing Practices, Gisele Ragusa Chapter 5: When daddy goes to prison: Examining crisis through fanfiction and poetry, Mary K. Thompson Chapter 6: Reading and Writing Teenage Motherhood: Changing Literacy Practices and Developing Identities, Kara L. Lycke Chapter 7: Disability Identification: Shifts in Home Literacy Practices, Gisele Ragusa Part II: Crises Arising from Literate Practices Chapter 8: Finding Husbands, Finding Wives: How Being Literate Creates Crisis, Loukia K. Sarroub Chapter 9: A State Take-Over: The Language of a School District Crisis, Rebecca Rogers and Kathryn Pole Chapter 10: Brewing a Crisis: Language, Educational Reform, and the Defense of a Nation, Susan Florio-Ruane Part III: Reflecting on Crises and Literacy Chapter 11 Commentators' Insights, Tracy Sweeney (Early Career Teacher), Jane Fung (Veteran Teacher) and Elizabeth Moje (Teacher Educator) List of Contributors

This article explores findings from a multiyear, multisite study of new college writing instructors. First, the authors describe the principles that guide new instructors’ teaching and reveal the number of resources that new instructors draw on beyond the pedagogy seminar. Second, they delineate how the kinds of classroom narratives these instructors choose to tell points to a range of understandings about what it means to teach writing. Finally, they argue that learning to teach writing is a complex process requiring sustained mentoring and support throughout the early years of teaching.

This article considers how users employ extraorganizational technical communication to reshape technologies, both materially and symbolically, even after these technologies enter into common use. Specifically, I analyze how women bicyclists of the 1890s authored instructional materials to complicate gendered and classed assumptions about users implicit in manufacturer-produced texts. I argue that technical communicators, in their teaching and research, should consider the role that extraorganizational technical communication plays in generating vital and lasting cultural changes.

This study considers how adolescents compose historical arguments, and it identifies theoretically grounded predictors of the quality of their essays. Using data from a larger study on the effects of a federally funded Teaching American History grant on student learning, we analyzed students’ written responses to document-based questions at the 8th grade ( n = 44) and the 11th ( n = 47). We report how students use evidence (a hallmark of historical thinking), how students structure their historical arguments, and what kinds of argumentative strategies they use when writing about historical controversies. In general, better writers cite more evidence in their arguments than weaker writers, and older students demonstrate how to situate evidence in ways that are consistent with the discipline. Both the structure of students’ arguments and their use of evidence were predictive of the overall quality of their essays. Finally, students’ use of argumentation strategies revealed patterns relevant to the historical topic and sources in question, as well as to differences related to writing skill. In our sample, better writers used strategies based on facts and evidence from the documents more so than weaker writers and demonstrated the capacity to contextualize and corroborate evidence in their arguments.

Tamika L. Carey , University at Albany – SUNY Enculturation : http://www.enculturation.net/rhetorical-healing-as-reeducation ( Published: January 16, 2013 ) In The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman’s Guide Through Life’s Dilemmas , motivational speaker, spiritual teacher, and self-help author Iyanla Vanzant describes one of her purposes for writing her best-selling 1996 book. She says: Black women do not understand there is no wrong in being human. There are only lessons. No matter how outlandish, ridiculous, or irresponsible our behavior may be at any given time, know, accept, love. There is nothing wrong with you. There is, however, always room for improvement and change… Self-knowledge is not about picking your scabs, beating up yourself, feeling bad about your wounds or weak spots. It means that you recognize you have them, make a commitment to nurture and strengthen them, and leave them alone to heal. (75) Such affirmations and calls for self-reflection are common features within the numerous African American self-help books and inspirational guides published for women since the nineties. The majority of these books “promise” to teach readers insights and strategies for overcoming the dis ease of past trauma or alleviating the dis content with challenges in their present lives. Readers and writers alike have found these self-help texts beneficial. For women like Brenda Sheffield, who claims that self-help books are “springboard[s] to discussing and healing [her] life and those of people [she] knows,” the benefit in reading them is learning, or re-learning, ways of being, knowing, or acting necessary for resuming one’s intended life path (Houser). For Vanzant, and other popular and profitable writers in this genre, activism is an incentive. Through writing books containing their testimonies, observations, and teachings, they pass on the ways of knowing they consider essential for the survival of their communities. Scholarship on self-help literature critiques…

Research questions: How can our current knowledge of experiential learning be applied to cross-cultural web-based training? How do postproject interviews with the participants advance our knowledge about experiential learning? What practical recommendations for teachers and trainers can be offered based on this and similar case studies? Situating the case: Literature on virtual teams stipulates the importance of teaching leadership development within teams, including methods of conflict resolution, and flexibility in methods and tools of communication. Literature on experiential learning places a high value on learner experience, and on indirect and combined methods of assessing experiential learning projects. Methodology: The case was studied through the analysis of data obtained from unstructured class interviews with three of the US-based participants of the teaching project. Interview participants were chosen to ensure a variety of responses about their experiences while taking part in the project. About the case: The project was a part of an introductory graduate-level seminar in technical and scientific communication. Graduate students in technical communication from the US and graduate students in marketing from Ukraine participated in the project. The participants worked in virtual teams to create collaborative analyses of localized versions of websites of transnational corporations. The findings of this research are as follows. (1) Virtual teams work more effectively when given time to build trust and connections among participants. (2) Virtual teams work more effectively when time is devoted to the development of leaders and the articulation of leadership responsibilities within teams. (3) Experiential learning team participants use a variety of communication tools depending on the nature of the communicative task at hand. (4) As part of the learning process, virtual team members recognized and attempted to adjust to cultural and professional discourse differences between countries and professional fields.

454 RHETORICA speakers moved (along with a comic lexicon of abuse) from drama to oratory, surfacing also in the Platonic dialogue (although ignored for the most part by Aristotle) and proliferating in Theophrastus. Although for the sake of clarity I have focused in this review on the central opposition between the aggressive versus and the weak and decadent speaker, W. is clear that these two types exist at opposite ends of a continuum and that characteristics of one type can slide into another. Particularly welcome is her insistence that the iambic mode transcends genre. This enables her to make wideranging and successful connections between comedy, satyr play, tragedy, philosophy, and forensic rhetoric. One of the pleasures of the book is to trace the various instantiations of the paradoxical figure of Socrates from Aristophanes to Plato and Theophrastus. Socrates does not occur explicitly in the last of these, but the cumulative force of W.'s analysis compels the reader to give serious consideration to her suggestion that he is a shadowy presence in several of Theophrastus7 caricatures, the product of "a tradition of characterization that wittily assimilates to intemperate types a teacher who used his famous recalcitrance to disparage and tease haughty, boastful elites" (317). Individual readers will, of course, find places where they could desire reformulation or areas where further questions arise. I, for example, am not entirely comfortable with the contention (22) that Plato adopted the language of insult from dramatic genres—this seems to me to be perhaps an overly reductive way of formulating a process that was surely more complex. This leads in turn to problems about how informal practices of insult bleed into and from the rhetoricized versions we find in our literary texts (a reading of the treatment of invective found in Plato's Laws 934-936 would be useful here). Yet it is no insult to suggest that the book presents opportunities for future reflection; some discomfort is a small price to pay for such thoughtful and productive work. Kathryn A. Morgan University of California at Los Angeles Sergey Dolgopolski. What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. xii + 333 pp. ISBN: 9780823229345 This book joins an increasing body of work devoted to the study of Jewish discourse. The study of Jewish rhetoric has found a place in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars who are turning their attention to the subject of non-Western or alternative rhetorics (Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley's Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics), as well as scholars who imagine that the conceptual integrity of the notion "Jewish perspectives" can be coherently expressed as a book (Andrea Greenbaum and Deborah Holstein's Jewish Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition). What is Talmud? Reviews 455 also shares a concern with work in Jewish studies devoted to pedagogy (Simcha Assaf), rabbinic literary activity (Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, David Stern), historiography (Ismar Schorsch), systematic Hebrew rhetorics (Isaac Rabinowitz, Arthur Lesley) and the hermeneutical activity of textbased communities (Moshe Halbertal). While there are resources enough from which to construct a course on "Jewish discourse," the idea of teaching and studying "Jewish rhetorics" is still problematic inasmuch as there is a sense that organizing the considerable scholarly activity devoted to "Jewish discourse" under the phrase "Jewish rhetorics" is at best an anachronistic projection and, at worst, an act of violent appropriation. One way to avoid the charges of appropriation or anachronism would be to treat "rhetoric" as a set of methodologies that could be productively applied to any "text." The problem with this approach is that often the methodologies that fall under the heading of rhetoric were produced in support of philosophical or historical investigations. For this reason, others have chosen to treat rhetoric as a set of concerns, or even a predisposition to ask certain kinds of questions. The idea of "Jewish rhetorics" might, in that instance as well, avoid the violence of appropriation, but "rhetoric," then runs the risk of simply being another name for something that is being productively and more accurately examined as "discourse" or "literary activity." The concept of "Jewish rhetorics" may encounter some resistance because, in avoiding the charges of anachronism or violence, "Jewish...

This paper discusses the results of a reflective case study involving academic writing within an undergraduate programme at a British university. Specifically, the study focuses on the positioning of the students’ central claims within their essays – and subsequent essay structure – and how this differs from a specific structure often taught within the US Freshman Composition class. Coming from this teaching background in the US, I made the assumption that such pedagogy would be transferable when I began teaching academic writing in a UK university in 2003; however, from my experience students have tended to resist placing their central claims within the introduction and this study might therefore illustrate a potential pedagogic issue that US trained writing professionals could face if teaching academic writing in Britain. The analysis of 535 essays from all three years of the programme, in addition to questionnaires completed by staff, students, and members of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), help to shed light on the nature of the thesis statement in the British academic writing context.

On 29 June 2011, 280 delegates interested in the teaching, tutoring, research, administration and development of academic writing in higher education in Europe descended upon the University of Limerick to discuss the role of the student experience in shaping academic writing development in higher education. The EATAW 2011 conference invited all those interested in academic writing development in higher education to contribute to the discussion on enhancing the quality of the student experience through writing. Enhancing the student experience is central to the vision and mission of most higher education institutions in Europe and beyond. How students experience academic writing impacts upon their identities and on their participation in academic and disciplinary environments. Writing programmes and initiatives that actively engage students in the writing conventions and practices of their academic communities can enhance the quality of the student learning experience.

This study applies Ivanic’s (2004) extension of Lea and Street’s (1998) model of approaches to the teaching of writing, to a body of student texts produced over a six-month period. Its purpose is to assess the impact of different kinds of feedback on iterative samples of academic writing. However, rather than analysing the texts of a number of different student writers, it examines different texts produced by the same writer. Using extracts from one early-career research student’s writing, supervisor notes and email messages, it argues that actual writers may continue to need and demand engagement in a variety of pedagogic practices on their way to developing their own voice. The possibility of inconsistent development with occasional lapses is accepted, with progress through Ivanic’s model being seen not in a developmental Piagetian way, but through a Vygotskian process of socialisation. In this sense, the position adopted is social constructionist. In particular, writers’ production of narrative around their research topic in the form of creative writing – one of Ivanic’s additions to the discourses in the Lea and Street model – may provide useful stimulus material (e.g. Clandinin and Connelly 2000: 41); and the application of Hatton and Smith’s (1995) framework of levels of reflection to the outcome may provide an indication of the timeliness of Ivanic’s other teaching approaches.

This paper presents a comparison of genre use at three Swiss universities from different language regions. The methodology is one of contrastive genre mapping in which we connect two lines of re-search usually seen as distinct approaches. The aim of the study is to find ways of comparing the writing cultures of different languages by collecting and comparing the genres used for teaching. Data about genres were gathered through questionnaires in which students and faculty members were asked to describe writing assignments and student texts. From the answers to these questionnaires, genre inventories were constructed and then re-checked with insiders in faculty discussions or inter-views. As results, lists of genres from the individual universities are presented, as are the patterns of genre families into which the genres were classified. It turned out that genre use shows strong similar-ities across the three universities. The main genre families are presented and differences between universities are discussed.

First-year engineering students are disinclined to view writing skills, and communication skills at large, as a core element of the engineering curriculum. Instead of arguing away this student skepticism, we aimed to harness it by way of an action research project in the writing class: students were challenged to find out for themselves whether, and if so, which communication skills are important for professional engineers and to write out their recommendations for the curriculum in a brief research paper. The teaching staff supported the research project by providing an online questionnaire, which 443 engineers filled out on the students’ invitation, and by offering support sessions on academic writing, research and ict skills. What the students learned from the questionnaire, was that the respondents spend very a significant amount of their working time communicating, while many of them struggle with several aspects of both written and oral communication. Abandoning their initial beliefs, the students recommended in their papers that communication skills take a central place in the engineering curriculum. The action research approach, in other words, helped students develop not only their academic writing skills, but also their attitudes towards communication courses and more generally, their understanding of 21st century engineering.

This professional autobiography, covering the time from my first teaching job in Spain upto the present, documents my development as a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher,showing how my thinking about teaching has evolved through my deepeningunderstanding of how learners learn the grammar of a second language.

This article describes the design and implementation of a cross-cultural composition coursewhich was designed to provide opportunities for ESL students and native English-speaking students to learn about cross-cultural literacy practices from each other in a first-year writing context at a community college in the Southwest.

A program in which prisoners teach ESL classes, supported by volunteer teacher-trainers, is a learning community with immense and sometimes unforeseen value.

This hands-on article advocates teaching form to ESL students through the use of contrastive rhetoric, demonstrates how students apply L1 and L2 forms, and offers suggestions for the classroom.

The guest editors introduce the issue.

This essay reflects on how one writing teacher incorporates photography in her practice to engage students of different backgrounds and experiences.

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.

Although outcomes assessment (OA) has become “common sense” in higher education, this article shows that the concept of outcomes tends to limit and compromise teaching and learning while serving the interests of institutional management. By contrast, the pragmatic concept of consequences tends to expand our view of teaching and learning, and contests the technical rationality of the managerial university. Though I challenge outcomes assessment, I recognize that OA is the coin of the educational realm. Therefore, this article outlines ways to frame and use educational aims to minimize the negative tendencies of outcomes assessment and to maximize the positive tendencies of “consequential assessment.”

Despite a growing awareness among teachers of the importance of recognizing and valuing a broader range of students’ literate resources and experiences, including those that are culturally and linguistically linked, in many language arts classrooms students’ literacy practices continue to be marginalized—remaining peripheral to, if not at odds with, the central work of the classroom. This ethnographic study, featuring a sixth-grade African American girl, examined one such case of marginalization that occurred in an urban English language arts classroom during an integrated novel study unit. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, the study considers how a student-authored play showcasing cultural and linguistic resources disrupted the planned curriculum and how tensions were negotiated by the teacher, student, and researcher. In spite of the student’s efforts and the teacher’s best intentions, hegemonic centripetal forces resisted and ultimately marginalized students’ literate interests and agendas in this classroom. Recommendations from this research include planning on, and for, dialogism by deliberately structuring curricula so there is both time and space for students’ literate interests, resources, and abilities.

As the number of pupils who are multilingual and multicultural continues to increase in the United States, finding ways to best support these learners’ writing has become a priority. This project explores the creation and use of third spaces that support writing in three diverse urban classroom contexts. Ethnographic case studies reveal the ways in which teachers created third spaces for multicultural and multilingual students’ voices to be heard (Bakhtin, 1986; Dyson, 2003). Findings suggest that co-constructing third spaces can contribute to a writing pedagogy that includes multilingual and multicultural student discourse(s) while expanding the social and practical purposes for writing. These findings have implications for teacher educators, researchers, and classroom teachers with regard to the power of co-constructed spaces where students’ lives and languages are used as the foundation for merging school and local networks.