The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius' Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus' De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Kathy Eden Kathy Eden Kathy Eden English Department Columbia University 602 Philosophy Hall New York, New York 10027 khe1@columbia.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 118–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kathy Eden; Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 118–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author's rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.

Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 Arthur E. Walzer Arthur E. Walzer Arthur Walzer Professor Emeritus, Communication Studies University of Minnesota 40 Prospect Park W, 1J Brooklyn, NY 11215 awalzer@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Arthur E. Walzer; Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 129–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.

The following collaborative project is designed to encourage students to investigate how rhetoric functions in everyday locations. Specifically, this assignment prompts students to document, analyze, and present the physical design and makeup of "privately owned public spaces" (POPS), a unique categorization of community spaces that is promoted as simultaneously private and public. The benefits of completing this assignment are multifaceted: students are given the opportunity to experience learning beyond the confines of the classroom, and students are able to practice rhetorical analysis on physical locations, thereby learning how rhetoric functions beyond written or verbal discourse and attuning them to the social contexts of public spaces.

In this assignment, students create a podcast episode in which they make an argument on a topic in current events. Through this process, students develop traditional rhetorical skills such as awareness of audience, formulation of a thesis, and inclusion of compelling evidence, in a new context that allows them room for creativity and for approaching these techniques from a different angle. Accustomed to composing analysis essays and research papers on a computer screen, students who create an argument in the aural medium must consider the best way to grab and hold the listener's attention so that the listener's mind does not wander, and to convey information clearly and concisely so that the listener never needs to rewind. Additionally, students become familiar with audio editing software and other aspects of digital composition, and they explore a medium that may feel like a refuge in today's screen-saturated world.

Sickle cell discourses are not merely descriptions of medical matters but contentious sites that invoke rhetorical arguments to support racialized medical borders, human difference, and ontological essentialism. In this essay, I examine in this essay is the way that those stricken by Sickle Cell Anemia appropriate the disease to advocate for their voice and visibility. I disclose how the construction of SCA as a black disease becomes a contested terrain which is often a “cultural centering on identity and dignity.” At odds is how the body is inscribed with a set of meanings in its association with blackness, the woeful ignorance that’s pervasive in the medical community of those who treat sickle cell patients and the indomitable will of the warrior to survive regardless. I consider the “warring ideals in one dark body,” urgings to be seen and heard. These manifest as performances of resistance, acts of resilience, and ways of asserting agency to maintain a semblance of humanity in the midst of situations that are anything but.

This article interrogates the rhetoric of “self-reliance” as a common feature of discourses about individual and community resilience by examining Canadian food charters in the context of regional food systems aimed at improving community food security. Despite the association of food charters with alternative food systems and progressive politics, we find that their ambiguous and shifting appeals to self-reliance largely conflict with their stated social justice goals of community food security, particularly the goal of alleviating the distress of food <em>in</em>security for vulnerable community members. Overall, we argue that the rhetoric of self-reliance in Canadian food charters primarily perpetuates a neoliberal ideology of resilience that promotes an active, enterprising ethos of responsibility for one’s own well-being, whether at the level of individuals, communities, or food systems. Our study thus contributes to critical scholarship that contextualizes and problematizes specific sites and practices of resilience discourse.

The phrase “It’s just a cycle” is commonly articulated in coastal resilience efforts and it also shapes broader public debates about climate change. Identifying the structure of arguments around cycles is a useful starting point for defining differences in perspective, but there is more to competing claims about cycles. It is this <em>more</em> that this essay aims to explore, starting with an opening example from an engaged rhetorical ethnographic project with Maine’s clam fishery. The example helps set up a methodological orientation to working with cycles within resilience-focused collaborations that draws from aesthetics and poetics. This approach aims to show how cycles shape world making and how attending to cycles as a trope can create a space for critical disruptions of colonial patterns. This is a space of intimate connection that allows cyclical rhythms, like those of tides, to help reveal a passageway to resilience.

This article examines how sensation and affect make different kinds of resilience meaningful to communities. Through a case study, we analyze public deliberation about a proposal to expand interstates in Tampa, Florida. We describe how evidence introduced by opposing sides foregrounded conflicting sensory experiences. The resulting sensoriums upheld different aspects of the city’s identity as worth maintaining. Drawing from recent scholarship defining resilience as something that can always be done otherwise, we suggest that resilience is better understood as entangled with public affect. We argue that a key point for rhetorical intervention in city planning is considering which futures and visions of resilience are being imagined for publics.

I argue for the importance of rhetorical schemes for understanding, diagnosing, and coping with forms of dementia. Schemes give salience (recruit attention), memorability (affect storage and facilitate retrieval), and aesthetic effects (induce a pleasurable emotional response) to configurations of language. They do so because of the way they play to neurocognitive pattern biases, like repetition, sequence, and position. Dementia is a condition under which language use degrades, alongside memory and attention, but pattern biases appear to remain and schemic configurations become more and more frequent in dementia speech. Rhetorical schemes, that is, are notably resilient to the forces that diminish language use in dementia.

In this essay, we demonstrate how rhetorical analyses of style can maintain their focus on linguistic patterns while simultaneously attending to material ones. Focusing on the trope of metonymy and the figures of incrementum and epistrophe, we show how these devices represent different modes of material-semiotic addressivity, resiliently turning and reconfiguring the rhetorical ecologies they capacitate. Using three case studies—a corpus of news articles about water quality amid extensive wind turbine development in Chatham-Kent, Ontario; traditional and “rogue” pain scales; and scientific literature about CRISPR—we explore the stylistic affordances of epistrophe, incrementum, and metonymy, showing how these “turnings” allow resilient material-semiotic articulations. We conclude by suggesting how our framework may be applied and extended to other topics and how this understanding of tropes and figures may align with other research trajectories in RSTM.

Rhetoric is a resilient art.Its stability and mutability across centuries attest to its dynamism as a domain of knowledge production and engaged practice.While resilience is understood differentially across scholarly and popular domains, it nearly always addresses questions of how to respond, adapt, and persist through adverse circumstances (for a review of this diverse literature, see Flynn, Sotirin, & Brady, 2012).For example, resilience has become a key trope for describing the practices of (bio)security, sustainability, human health, child development, infrastructure, technological systems, and other common sites of study in rhetorics of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM).Recently, rhetoricians have also taken up resilience; these scholars are interested both in using rhetoric to understand resilience and using resilience to understand rhetoric.This special issue of POROI is intended to further the scholarly conversation on resilience rhetorics.In particular, we hope to highlight the deeply rhetorical, critical, cultural, and materialsemiotic work being done by and with theories and metaphors of resilience.The collection of articles assembled here initially arose from our experience co-chairing the Association for Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine's (ARSTM) second annual preconference at the biennial Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2018.The ARSTM preconferences at RSA and the National Communication Association (NCA) meetings always focus on a core theme; other themes have included trust, evidence, and translation (ARSTM, 2019).

Population health is a concept at the core of national healthcare reform efforts. Population health focuses on the social determinants of health, or the living conditions of people at work, home, and play. To participate in population health initiatives, organizations must collect population-level data, creating a discourse of resilience-as-ability-to-cope through mapping community demographics, as though a counting of bodies and their material conditions creates a foundation for sustained, improved health outcomes. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) launched an initiative called Healthy People 2020, a set of ten-year national goals and objectives for health promotion and disease prevention. In this essay, we analyze this data project, arguing that the discourses of resiliency (through improved national, state, and local data collection efforts) and vulnerability (of the people who are reduced to data) create a constitutive rhetoric for U.S. public health officials to rally around the cause of population health yet exclude the very people upon whom such a cause should focus. Specifically, an examination of the ODPHP’s Healthy People 2020 website reveals that the reduction of bodies to quantification in data displays for health professionals, when viewed through the lens of Philip Wander’s Third Persona, objectifies groups of people already historically marginalized and obfuscates pathways to social action. We argue that instead, an ecological, relational definition of resilience must be fostered through autonomy of communities in the decisions they make about their own community members’ health and wellness.

"Function" is a vitally important concept in the scientific community. Scientists use it to describe and address a wide variety of research problems. In publications, however, scientists within and across disciplines interpret function differently. For example, intense debate surrounds what percentage of the human genome should be deemed "functional" rather than "junk DNA." In this essay, we analyze the use of function in the research of <i>de novo</i> gene birth, a budding scientific field that studies how novel genes can emerge in non-genic sequences. Our research team, composed of a rhetorical scholar, philosopher, structural biologist and systems biologist, crafts a taxonomy of how "function" is variously constituted in <i>de novo</i> gene birth publications, including as expressions, capacities, interactions, physiological implications and evolutionary implications. We argue function is shaped by the diverse onto-epistemological perspectives of scientists and is both a recalcitrant and resilient concept of scientific practice. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's writings on a scientific mode of thinking, functions are time-space scales of objects under investigation that make possible references to scientific measurements.

I appreciate that this paper was applauded for its thoughtful approach to assessing “prescription drug labels (PDLs)” using rhetorical principles. However, I believe the authors’ invention of the composite artifact “PDL” and their subsequent assessment based on this flawed concept is problematic and may weaken the validity of their conclusions.

This study examines the visual representation of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to1925. Compilers of the Atlases used a variety of visual strategies to facilitate rhetorical inclusion and exclusion, and by creating particular visual emphasis, constructed Chinese immigrants as being alienated, racialized, and low in the ethnic hierarchy. The visual constructs of the Chinese population reflected and reshaped the state’s policy of immigration restriction in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“When I say the word environmental, what is the first thing that comes to mind?” (Ross, p. 1). So begins Ross’ edited collection, Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric, which examines how language an...

As globalization exerts a higher demand on the technical communication profession, technical communication scholars and practitioners have paid significant attention to translation/localization (St...

Sarah Stickney Ellis, a popular and prolific writer, is now perhaps best remembered as Victorian England’s foremost “propagandist of domesticity.” Ellis, in her Young Ladies’ Reader (1845) “domesticated” women’s elocution by situating it within the home. Although women occupied the private rather than the public sphere, they nevertheless were responsible for much of England’s national greatness—its distinctive “domestic character.” In The Young Ladies’ Reader, elocution becomes a domestic duty supporting the English home and nation. Ellis restricts women’s reading to the private domain thereby reinforcing rhetoric’s traditional separation of male and female discourse.

This article examines how digital rhetoric in a big data age affects human and more-than-human life (lands, waters, energies, and so forth) in places beyond immediate rhetorical encounters. By putting particular pressure on what the author calls digital damage, the article draws out the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of Facebook’s New Mexico data center. Coupling Donna Haraway’s methodological tactic of “staying with the trouble” with cultural rhetorics perspectives on story, accountability, and relationality, the essay shows how digital damage can be expressed through a series of interruptive stories. Ultimately, the article intervenes in debates on the Anthropocene, arguing that attending to digital damage through story is one way to register the sensitivities, urgencies, and accountabilities needed to respond to worlds of entangled damage.

What does the endeavor to end chronic homelessness entail? Is ending homelessness a matter of public funding? Of providing shelter beds and access to health care? In Homeless Advocacy and the Rheto...

This essay addresses the deep division and antagonism in political culture, focusing on rhetorical approaches to citizenship conducive to an agonistic pluralism where a multiplicity of viewpoints exist under a larger framework of cooperation. Specifically, it draws on a diverse set of ideas within the rhetorical tradition and popular culture to examine and advocate for “radical friendliness” as a positive and potentially transformative mode of interaction. Friendliness—the observable, rhetorical dimension of friendship—is geared toward identification and consubstantiality and as such, provides one path toward a more productive democratic community.

This article examines the modern foster care system through its intersections with rhetorical theories of care and rhetorical practices of hospitality and provision. At the beginning of the twentieth century, policy makers and activists promoted different rhetorics of fostering as they debated ways to care for America’s vulnerable and dependent children. From this national crisis of child welfare, the modern foster care system emerged. Revisiting the rhetorical struggle over foster care reopens the question of what it means to foster and brings into focus practices of family-making, parenting, child-rearing, and basic hospitality that are implicated in the response.

This article examines Reddit-users’ (“redditors”) responses to a story concerning proposed legislation that would require parents considering not vaccinating their children to participate in a public-health delivered education session on the science of immunization. In theorizing Reddit as a “peripheral public” venue and attending to its use of algorithms to sort content and commentary, this case study uses a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach to explore the rhetorical strategies employed by redditors as they discuss the proposed legislation and the scientific controversy behind it—suggesting new strategies for investigating participatory media, as well as insights for key stakeholders in the vaccine controversy.

"Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education." Rhetoric Review, 39(1), pp. 118–119

This article examines data from an ethnographic study of an online Mormon women’s discussion board to argue that enclaves can be places for important critical and civic work. These women’s common religious identity and shared experiences of intolerance on a public board led them to adopt discursive conventions that included intimate literacy. These discursive conventions allowed for disruption of ideological feedback loops and development of responsible rhetorical agency. This article argues that an enclave’s capacity for generating openness to difference depends on the strength of the ideologies espoused and on the values and discursive conventions that guide the enclave.

Attempting to explain the vast levels of income and wealth inequality in America today is a daunting task. Compounding this endeavor by also attempting to explain the rise of Donald J. Trump is ano...

Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author’s rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.

The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius’ Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus’ De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

Horace’s Art of Poetry supplied the medieval schools with the only available classical doctrines on fiction and poetry before Aristotle’s Poetics became widely studied in the fifteenth century. Horace exercized both practical and theoretical influence on literary exegesis, and shaped medieval and early Renaissance doctrines of composition by discussing the very nature of fiction, narrative techniques, authorial roles, description of character and tone, including performance and reading of a text. The anonymous commentators as well as the Dante commentator Francesco da Buti (1395) were deeply influenced by the twelfth-century “Materia” Commentary, but also by the Arabic notion of an independent art of poetics, and remained in lively dialogue with the teaching of Ciceronian rhetoric of invention, disposition, elocution, and delivery.

Reviews 129 to rebrand old ideologies and invent new rhetorical repertoires with direct appeal to twenty-first-century audiences both at home and abroad. Reading The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong is a true delight, a delight that is made possible by Xing Lu s dispassionate and deeply engaging study of political rhetoric in modern China in general and Mao's transformative rhet­ oric in particular. As China continues to make its presence importantly felt on the world stage, understanding and developing a productive dialogue with its rhetoric is imperative. The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong should serve as an efficacious guide toward this urgent task confronting today's rhetori­ cians and politicians of all persuasions. Luming Mao University of Utah Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 In An Argument on Rhetorical Style, Marie Lund builds on the work of Maurice Charland on constitutive rhetoric to advance constitutive style as an original contribution to rhetorical theory. To what extent is Lund's claim to have made an original contribution to centuries-long thought about style borne out by her argument? The first part of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is conceptual, distin­ guishing "constitutive style" from other ways of theorizing style. Lund draws on Wolfgang G. Muller's analysis to organize a taxonomy. In Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981), Muller identifies two tropes as dominating concep­ tions of style in the West: "style as dress" and "style as the man." Both have complicated histories. Style as dress would seem to see style as divorced from underlying ideas and, therefore, as decorative. But in the Renaissance, where the style as dress trope flourishes, Lund notes that ornatus was often thought of more as armament than decoration (58): for example, in John Hoskins' Directions for Speech and Style. Still, in so far as the live canons are thought of as a sequence, traditional rhetoric has fostered the idea that stylistic concerns are belated. With regard to "style is the man," this too is a complicated trope. When Comte de Buffon wrote in "Discourse on Style" that Le style c'est Thomme meme, he meant something quite different from both Quintilian who claimed that speech is commonly an index of character (Institutes, 11.1.30) and from the Romantics with their emphasis on the uniqueness of a personality as reflected in speech. Regardless of these diffe­ rences, Lund's claim that we have often theorized style as the formal embodiment of the speaker or writer's personality" (208) is true enough. Muller's two tropes of style serve as the ground on which Lund mounts her claim for a third topos: style as constitutive: "Wolfgang Muller is responsible for the first two topoi, while the last [constitutive] is my own invention," Lund writes (208). She reviews previous work on the figures 130 RHETORICA and on style generally to place her work in context and to shore up her claim of originality. Among scholars working on the rhetorical figures, Jeanne Fahnestock receives the most attention. Although Fahnestock does consider the figures as constitutive in her Rhetorical Figures in Science (p.22), she does not oppose constitutive to decorative, as Lund does. Instead, she distinguishes figures as functional or not—as advancing an argument or distracting from it. Fahnestock shows that even in scientific argument, figures are present and often serve a functional purpose by for­ mally epitomizing the structure of a scientific argument. For example, in the argument Darwin advances in the Origin that gradual change in response to natural selection turns variations from incipient species to new species, Fahnestock shows that the formal qualities of this argument are captured in the figure gradatio that characterizes Darwin's style (Fahnes­ tock 113-14). But it would be wrong to say that the gradatio is constitutive of the argument because gradatio, like all figures, is in itself skeletal, lacking evi­ dence and is not, therefore, probative. Lund also discusses Lakoff and John­ son on cognitive metaphor. But their point is that metaphor is a generative cognitive process—and therefore relates to invention. If a metaphor goes unnoticed, can we say it contributes to style? Lund's...

122 RHETORIC A rejected some time ago,1 goes beyond redescribing Aristotelian virtues as vices in decoupling Aristotle's twin arts of politics and ethics according to the Aristotelian distinction between making and doing. Whereas the outcome of the former is a product, that of the latter is an action. And products differ from actions in that as made things products must be judged in and of them­ selves, according to how well they work and how long they last. Actions, in contrast, can only be qualified in terms of the moral character and intentions of the agents. As a made thing or product, then, the state, which, as we have seen, must be preserved at all costs, does not derive its quality of being good or bad from the moral dispositions of its rulers. Compared rather to the doc­ tor and the painter, Machiavelli's prince practices an art rooted ultimately in techrie rather than arete understood as excellence in any moral sense. Kathy Eden Columbia University David Randall, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siecle's Conversation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, vi + 266 pp. ISBN 9781474430104 David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni­ versity Press, 2019, vii + 288 pp. ISBN 9781474448666 In The Concept of Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment, David Randall proposes that conversation as a social, cultural, and histor­ ical force has not received its due, especially in the history of rhetoric. True, books on conversation appear every so often within and outside the academy, whether historian Peter Burke's modest essay collection The Art of Conversation, literary scholar Jane Donawerth's recovery of con­ versation as a model for women's rhetorical theory in Conversational Rhet­ oric, or American essayist Stephen Miller's quasi-apocalyptic jeremiad, Conversation: A Historij of a Declining Art. But Randall's ambitions are gran­ der. Beginning with these two volumes and promising an as-vet-untitled sequel, he unfolds the concept of conversation's development from ancient Rome through the Enlightenment, as well as its struggle to displace oratory as the dominant rhetorical mode. With these ends in mind, Randall Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), 131-38, esp. 135: "Thus the difference between Machiavelli and his contemporaries cannot adequately be characterized as a difference between a moral view of politics and a view of politics as divorced from morality. The essential contrast is rather between two different moralities—two rival and incompatible accounts of what ought ultimately to be done." Reviews 123 promises two interventions common to both books: first, to reveal conver­ sation s place in rhetoric s history, and second, to realize a larger narrative reorganization along the lines of Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transfor­ mation of the Public Sphere and Theory and Practice (Concept 2-3, 8-10). Beginning with Cicero's Rome and concluding with the Republic of Letters, The Concept of Conversation challenges conversation's exclusion from the history of rhetoric by following the parallel advances of sermo (or con­ versation) and conversatio (which Randall glosses variously in both books as "behavior" and "mutual conduct") until their convergence into a wider ranging phenomenon of sociability motivated by economic self-interest (Concept 1, 5, 183; Conversational 5). After the introduction establishes the many conceptual and theoretical terms Randall juggles, chapters 1, 2, and 3 track how conversation transcended its origins as interpersonal discus­ sion. Per Chapter 1, ancient sermo was familiar, leisured conversation that sought philosophical truth conducted among the educated, male, Roman elite. It was represented in print in dialogue form and generally thought to expiate oratory's transgressions, even as its own vices—flattery, for instance—threatened its irenic aims. Chapter 2 details how Medieval Chris­ tianity universalized the concept of friendship, while the increasing public­ ness of letters pushed the ars dictaminis toward oratorical rather than conversational ends. The third chapter traces how Renaissance humanism loosened conversation's connection to Ciceronian sermo further, making conversation "the synecdoche for all conversational modes of inquiry." In this way, conversation became a metaphor that extended far beyond in-person discussion (Concept 83). These opening...

126 RHETORICA argument seems to be the subject of his next book, so perhaps we shall have to wait and see (Conversational 11). Relatedly, the exclusion of some significant studies feels puzzling. Peter Mack's 2011 A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, for instance, is nowhere to be found, while Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold would have been a useful interlocutor regarding women's place in rhetorical history. Finally, the books' sweeping arc narrating conversation's inevitable march toward the Madisonian republic may leave readers—especially ones well-versed in par­ ticular figures and periods—wishing for greater consideration of complicat­ ing biographical and cultural context. My own interest in the English Civil Wars, for instance, left me wanting greater attention throughout to the influence of theology, as religion largely disappears by the midpoint of The Conversational Enlightenment. Nonetheless, as Randall concedes, it is impossible to read (and therefore write about) everything (Conversational 16). His bibliography is long enough, and his claims about specific texts are modest. The citations point readers to internecine arguments on individ­ ual texts and authors. In penning a broad history of conversation that capablv finds continu­ ities and productive discontinuities, Randall has written two books that largely succeed in many of their aims. Though they are on conversation rather than toleration, the books share a kindred spirit with the similarly sweeping Toleration in Conflict by Rainer Forst. For historians of rhetoric, Randall provides a useful primer on the history of conversation and renders visible its ongoing tensions with oratory in ways that should open produc­ tive areas of inquiry. Readers who are curious about how Randall's argu­ ment about Habermas will conclude are advised to read both volumes, but thanks to a generous summary of The Concept of Conversation that opens The Conversational Enlightenment, scholars invested in specific periods or figures may read whichever volume is more germane to their work with lit­ tle trouble. In this reader's estimation, The Conversational Enlightenment is the better book if only for Randall's conceptual bravura in tracking conver­ sation's broader metaphorization and influence beyond obviously verbal texts and mediums. How Randall's revision of Habermas will resolve remains to be seen, but these books make a compelling case that there is still plenty more to say about conversation. James Donathan Garner University of Texas at Austin Xing Lu, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its Peo­ ple. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2017, 261 pp. ISBN 978161177527 Much ink of mostly binary ilk has been spilled ox er Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China. A revolutionarx and charismatic leader, Mao was hailed as a savior for liberating millions of Chinese people Reviews 127 from the Japanese Occupation and for ending the civil war in 1949, but he was also blamed or condemned for the social and economic turmoil he single-handedly brought about through his many political campaigns, including the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, not much has been written about his rhetoric, about how he deployed language and other symbolic resources to weaponize his political campaigns, to mobilize the Chinese people and to transform Chinese society. In the process, he also transformed himself into a demigod who was both greatly admired and worshiped by his people and feared and despised by his opponents. The 2017 publication of The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People by Xing Lu, an award-winning scholar of Chinese and comparative rhetoric, certainly has provided a much-needed response to this lack or absence. In fact, the monograph also opens a timely window onto the mak­ ing of political discourse in the twentieth-century China and beyond. As a first book-length study of Mao Zedong's rhetoric, Lu's mono­ graph has a lot to offer to rhetoric scholars and students of political rhetoric in the twenty-first century. Consisting of seven major chapters plus an intro­ duction and a conclusion, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong develops a detailed and highly contextualized study of Mao's writings and speeches throughout his lifetime beginning in 1913 and ending in 1975, the year before his pass­ ing. Rejecting past...

Christoph Georg Leidl In memoriam January 10, 1960 - August 17, 2019. t came as a terrible shock for all of us when just a few weeks after the Biennial Con­ ference in New Orleans this past July, where we had been together with him and shared hilarious chats, drinks, and music, the news spread that our friend, colleague and fellow ISEiR member Christoph Leidl had passed away from this world at the age of only 59 years. Born in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria in 1960, from 1979 to 1986 Christoph studied Greek, Latin, and History at the Uni­ versity of Munich, Germany, and (during the academic year 1982-1983) at St. John's College, Oxford, UK. It was from the University of Munich that he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his PhD in Ancient History, Greek and Latin in 1991, with an edition and commentary on Appian's history of the Second Punic War in Spain, printed 1996. During the years 1987 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics in Munich, again interrupted by a stay in Oxford from 1995 to 1997 on a research grant from the German Research Fund (DFG). From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Mannheim, until he received a tenured post as Akademischer Rat Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 1-13. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. nrnress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.1 2 RHETORICA at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 (promoted to Akademischer Oberrat in 2006), where he has been working and teaching ever since. Besides a steadily growing emphasis on the theory and history of rhetoric, in which he particularly focused on the theory of metaphor and tropes, the orator's ethos, rhetorical pedagogy, and humour in oratory, Christoph also did research and published on poetics and literary criticism, on ancient historiography and on the reception of ancient drama in music. Christoph had been an ISHR member since 1995, and missed almost none of our conferences, with the sad exception precisely of the one in Tubingen in 2015, when he fell ill. He also held various offi­ ces in ISHR. He was a Council member from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 also took on the chair of the membership committee, a duty he fulfilled with enormous dedication and accuracy until his last days. Everyone will remember his meticulous membership reports delivered at each Council or General Business meeting. Christoph was perfectly versed not only in ancient literature, but also in modern and contemporary literatures. He knew his Shakespeare, Moliere and Goethe just as well as his Homer, Virgil, or Horace, and he was acquainted with contemporary approaches to rhetoric just as much as with Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian. His private library filled an entire house and might have been the envy of many a department library. One wondered when, alongside his exorbitant duties in teaching and administration, he ever found the time for reading all those books. In addition, he was also a great lover of music. He had stupendous knowledge in all things music and was able to talk in minute details about concert pianists, conduc­ tors or particular recordings, and he was himself an excellent piano player. He was also a passionate mountain hiker. Besides all this, he had a wonderful and subtle sense of humour, and an extremely amiable character; his big inviting smile remains unforgettable. On the other hand, Christoph was an indefatigable worker with an outstanding sense of duty. Not only was he more than thorough in his research, but he was also always available for his students whenever they needed help. He seemed to be permanently active; it appeared as if he never rested, and indeed he may well too often have burnt the candle at both ends. Only lately he talked about a change in his way of life. But it...

This paper argues that Elizabethan handbooks on poetics enact two coevolving traditions in the history of rhetoric and poetics: one sees poetry as a rhetorical art of stylistic invention, while the other sees it as an object of study, analysis, and ethical training. To show this, I examine George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy and contrast it with William Scott’s recently discovered Model of Poesy. Puttenham demonstrates how poetic style works as a tool of rhetorical invention; Scott, on the other hand, treats poetics as a method of literary critical analysis. Scott’s poetics, I argue, is derived from a “paideutic” tradition, the aims of which mirror those found in educational treatises that concern the hermeneutic training students received in English grammar schools. Puttenham, writing for courtiers, instead makes a case for poetics as a means of rhetorical adaptation at court—his handbook, in short, shows poetry to be a rhetorical and pragmatic art of verbal performance that exists outside the schoolroom.

Reviews Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Students of the rhetorical tradition will learn a great deal from Skinner's From Humanism to Hobbes; for like Elobbes, Skinner has mastered the rhetorical curriculum that informs the humanist education of sixteenthand seventeenth-century writers like Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, and, of course, Hobbes himself. Even more to the point, Skinner's mastery of this tradition has made him attentive to the fundamentally adversarial nature of their writings, allowing him to uncover the argumentative structures and stylistic figures that underwrite their persuasive effects. It has also, I expect, helped him to hone his own enviable argumentative skills, whether he is making the case for the origins of political representation in the art of the actor, the role of rhetorical redescription in Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's Coriolanus, or the iconographic identity of the colossus in the frontispiece of Leviathan. Without by any means exhausting the impor­ tant and wide-ranging issues addressed in this book, these three cases will surely interest the readers of this journal because they set in high relief how deeply embedded such rhetorical strategies as personation or prosopo­ poeia, paradiastole, and enargeia are in the thinking and writing of earlv modernity. Two of the twelve essays in this collection (chapters 3 and 5) turn—or, for Skinner's devoted readers, return—to the figure of paradiastole, also cal­ led rhetorical redescription by Skinner because it refers to the orator's effort to "spin" the narrative of events, including the moral characters of the agents involved, by reframing vices as virtues and vice versa, impugning caution as cowardice, for instance, or packaging recklessness as braverv. Although arguably not among the most high-profile rhetorical figures, paradiastole, as Skinner demonstrates, propels the core mission of the rhetorician to leverage the affective power of language to alter what an audience believes, to manipulate its responses by using word-choice to elevate or denigrate its targets. In keeping with this mission, Skinner also demonstrates, rhetorical theorists from Aristotle to Quintilian to Susenbrotus to Thomas Wilson take the paradiastolic move into account, whether thev feature the technical term Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 118-132. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: wwv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ rh.2020.38.1.118 Reviews 119 in its polysyllabic Greek form, translate it into Latin or the vernacular, or leave it nameless. Following his signature method, Skinner arms his readers with an understanding of this key term before using it to unlock the complex texts he considers in the context of the controversies they engage. In the Prince, for instance, Machiavelli counters the long-standing tradition of classical ethics exemplified by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De officiis by redescribing the qualities they endorse as political liabilities destined to destroy the state, rather than maintain it. With this single-minded end of mantenere lo stato in view, Skinner argues, Machiavelli "redefines the con­ cept of virtu" (56), exposing previously held virtues such as liberality and kindness as vices when practiced in the political arena (60). Shakespeare's use of paradiastole, on the other hand, reflects a reversal in rhetorical theory that Skinner attributes to Quintilian and finds wide­ spread among Tudor rhetoricians. Whereas the figure originally serves to expose or unmask the verbal manipulation of one's adversary, it is eventually deployed to excuse one's own shortcomings and mitigate culpability by redescribing one's vices as virtues. After flagging this strat­ egy in a number of Shakespeare's plays, Skinner concludes that "It is in the assessment of Coriolanus's character, however, that Shakespeare makes his most extended use of paradiastole" (111). For the in utramque partem structure this late Shakespearean tragedy shares with all drama encoura­ ges the representation of controversy or debate, which, in this case, invol­ ves "coloring...

Research on written communication shows that rhetorical knowledge is a key domain of disciplinary writing expertise (Gere et. al. 2019). Much of the recent work in this area has focused on the social dimensions of learning this knowledge. This article builds on these conversations with a presentation of two “advanced academic writers” (Tardy, 2009) and interpreting how they conceptualize rhetorical knowledge through an understanding of academic communication as transaction and symbolic exchange (Britton &amp; Pradl, 1982). I make a case for the value of a transactional framework for interpreting writers’ performance of genre situations. I also show that this framework can provide a “metagenre” (Carter, 2007), a way of doing writing in the discipline, and a “threshold concept” (Adler-Kassner &amp; Wardle, 2015), a way of thinking about writing tasks that shapes writers’ experiences of and learning with them. The two case studies provide an argument for the efficacy of rhetorical knowledge in fostering disciplinary genres when it is framed as understanding situations of communication.

In many ways, the transformative character of developing critical consciousness reflects the dynamics of acquiring threshold concepts. Drawing from research into threshold concept acquisition, the author argues that critical first-year composition instruction can more effectively scaffold students into critical perspectives by linking critical pedagogy more closely with efforts to develop students’ rhetorical meta-awareness of writing.

The author reconsiders and revises her advocacy of the pedagogical performance of neutrality and argues that performing or otherwise rehabilitating notions of “objectivity” as we teach argument may be particularly useful and urgent in the Trump era.

Other| December 01 2020 From the Interim Editor Mary E. Stuckey Mary E. Stuckey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (4): 635. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0635 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mary E. Stuckey; From the Interim Editor. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2020; 23 (4): 635. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0635 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. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay identifies and explicates a key rhetorical form—“redemptive exclusion”—underlying former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s efforts to defend barring Syrian refugees from American soil. Through a reliance on ethotic prolepsis, the rhetorical form of redemptive exclusion enables the creation of a transcendent perspective that reconciles seemingly opposite contemporary cultural and political rhetorics: xenophobic discourses of exclusion become coarticulated with the mythic promise of an America open to all. We show how Haley’s rhetoric combines antithetical gestures of inclusion and exclusion by interweaving synecdochic narratives of her own immigrant history; hyperbolic narratives of American benevolence toward immigrants; and stereotypical narratives of terrorist identity that preempt the acceptance of Syrian refugees as even potentially American. We argue that Haley converts the rejection of Syrian refugees from American soil into an opportunity for constraining and qualifying the mythic ideal of the United States as an historical beacon for immigrants around the globe. In the conclusion, we suggest that a close study of how redemptive exclusion takes life in Haley’s discourse offers more general lessons about the rhetorical and ideological character of controversies over U.S. immigration policy.

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

In this essay, we examine the complete published speeches of Arne Duncan from his seven years (2009–2015) as Barack Obama’s secretary of education, to understand how his language both defined problems and promoted solutions for our nation’s schools. By looking at Duncan’s rhetoric through close readings and computer-aided textual analyses, we find that his discourse contained paradoxes, particularly through a notion of schooling as a means of achieving both social justice and economic growth, by framing education as both a private and public good, and through assertions about the need for government both to centralize authority over schooling and promote a global educational marketplace. In essence, Duncan used a both/and approach to these purposes, adding to our understandings of the character and functions of educational rhetoric and showing how critical it is for scholars to recognize that such tensions exist in language about what education policy should do. Ultimately, we conclude that Duncan’s rhetoric obscures historic tensions in the purpose of education and highlights the way that policy rhetoric may saddle public education with responsibilities beyond its capacities.

For many, the academic job-search process involves experiencing rejection, self-doubt, and depression. And a common form of communication during this process—job-refusal letters—can reinforce these negative experiences. This article uses rhetorical genre analysis to study 131 academic job-refusal letters and the applicants’ perceptions of these letters. First it constructs a model of the common genre moves in the sample of letters, giving specific examples of variation in these moves. Then it correlates these moves with the applicants’ perceptions of the letters they received, analyzing the results for statistically significant variations in patterns of applicant perceptions. Based on these analyses, the author argues that the most typified genre moves do not contribute to applicants’ feeling valued. Instead, letters building goodwill through less typified moves and language are often more effective. Ultimately, he argues that we can make the job-search process more humane by attending to the specifics of the full range of interactions between applicants and institutions.

With Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, Michele Kennerly has produced an erudite contribution to the fields of ancient rhetoric, intellectual history, and c...

The centennial of the First World War constituted a major event for many nations. For New Zealand, much of the memorialization focused on the campaign at Gallipoli, which has become an important part of the nation’s identity. This essay examines one of the official memorials to Gallipoli, a large exhibition entitled “The Scale of Our War.” Designed in conjunction with filmmaker Sir Richard Taylor and his Weta Studio, the exhibition combines artifacts and displays with larger than life hyperrealistic figures. Focusing on the cinematic framing of the exhibition, we question the rhetorical limits of media technologies in creating immersive experiences for patrons. We suggest that the spectacle of the cinematic framing of remembrance may overshadow the events being remembered.

In the Black Lives Matter era, scholarship focused on race and state (sanctioned) violence is commonly remarked on by allies within and beyond the academy as “timely.” While Ersula J. Ore’s Lynchin...