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November 2016

  1. Review Essay – Rethinking Recovery Work: New Directions in Feminist Histories of Rhetoric

September 2016

  1. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion by Vessela Valiavitcharska
    Abstract

    Reviews 465 In chapters 3 and 4 Cribiore works through the question(s) of Libanius' opinions of paganism and Christianity in his letters and speeches, showing convincingly that Libanius held a moderate cultural-conservative position that enabled him to genuinely be friends with Christians as well as pagans — which, after all, one would expect from a rhetorician who grasps the value of argumentum in utranique parton not only as a method of debate but also as a way of life, an ethic for a civilized, humane society. Despite these criticisms I do in fact like this book. I particularly like its refutation of the Gibbonesque judgment on Libanius, and its portrait of rhetoric in late antiquity as very much still alive and doing practical civic as well as cultural work (see in particular p. 36). In a sense this book is a sort of appendix to The School of Libanius, which I think remains the most impor­ tant of Cribiore's books for rhetoricians and historians of rhetoric. Different readers of this journal will want to read both Libanius the Sophist and Hellenistic Oratory for different reasons, and your responses likely will differ from mine, depending on your scholarly interests and orientation. Bottom line, these books give us a closer, better description of rhetoric in the Hellenistic age and late antiquity, and belong on the rhetorician's bookshelf. Jeffrey Walker, University of Texas at Austin Valiavitcharska, Vessela. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 243 pp. ISBN: 9781107273511 Midway through the introduction to Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium, Vessela Valiavitcharska sets forth the book's aim, which is to "make a step toward contributing to" an understanding of "the argumentative and emo­ tional effects of discourse, and of the mental habits involved in its produc­ tion" (p. 12). That professed goal, enfolded in prepositions and couched in the incremental language of a step—and a single step at that—is modest. And while the framing of the book, and for that matter, Valiavitcharska her­ self, exude modesty, the rigor, disciplinary reach, and sheer brilliance of her study calls for less modest account. That is where I come in. In addition to its intrinsic value of reclaiming the Old Church Slavic homily tradition for rhetorical study, Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium joins at least three rising trends in rhetorical studies. The first two are burgeoning interests in 1) Byzantine rhetoric and 2) the recovery of pre-modern class­ room practices. Thomas Conley and Jeffrey Walker have both pointed out the importance of Byzantine rhetoric and have done much to dismantle assumptions that this period presents merely a redaction of classical texts and teaching. Scholars in the U.S. (David Fleming, Raffaella Cribiore, Marjo­ rie Curry Woods, Martin Camargo) and Europe (Manfred Kraus, Ruth Webb, 466 RHETORICA María Violeta Pérez Custodio) have revived an interest in the progymnasmata and have developed new methods for identifying and extrapolating class­ room practices from extant artifacts. Valiavitcharska both makes use of those methods and extends them. These two contexts together mean that there ought to be a broad, interdisciplinary readership for Rhythm and Rhetoric in Byzantium. But there is still a third exciting context for this work, one that extends its reach past classical scholars and historians of rhetoric and to scholars concerned with sensory dimensions of rhetoric, specifically those facilitating rhetoric's sonic turn. Scholarship in rhetoric, communication, and commu­ nications have very recently seen an uptick in interest in how sound shapes thought, interaction, messages, and sociality. Scholars such as Gregory Goodale, Matthew Jordan, Joshua Gunn, Richard Graff, and Jonathan Sterne are leading the way here. This work, partly a response to what rhetoric scholar Sidney Dobrin (following Donna Haraway) calls the "tyranny of the visual," is cutting edge. Some of it is historical, but (with the important exception of Graff) the history is usually limited to the twentieth century, mainly because of its focus on sound-recording technologies, which are rela­ tively recent. Valiavitcharska's work promises to turn the heads of these scholars and their followers, to reveal to them the intricate and longstanding root system of sonic rhetoric, and to stretch...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2016.0007

July 2016

  1. Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth-Century European Art
    Abstract

    Despite pioneering reclamation efforts, feminist rhetoricians have only scratched the surface of the multilayered historical reception and representation of Aspasia, a fifth-century BCE Milesian woman famous for the company she kept. Aspasia's penchant for historical perseverance means that her recovery must extend far beyond the ancient world. Throughout the centuries roused by the so-called Woman Question, she was on the lips and brush-tips of many on the lookout for antecedent and analogous women to serve as models or antimodels. Focusing on nineteenth-century Europe, we illustrate her powerful presence in art. Our discussion showcases Aspasia conversing (Nicolas-André Monsiau), instructing (Honoré Daumier), and contemplating (Henry Holiday). In their work Aspasia resists attempts to mute her colors and reemerges as a painted lady.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1178688
  2. A Rhythmic Refrain: Britain’s Mass-Observation as Rhetorical Assemblage
    Abstract

    Mass-Observation’s archives and methodology offer insight for expanding the concept of network to assemblage through deterritorializing and reterritorializing rhetorical aspects of historiography and normative historical narratives. Reading M-O’s archives as “worlds expressing” rather than individual, subjective expressions of a world helps theorize rhetorical networks as less straightforward and accountable, provoking recognition of multiple rhetorical agents that coproduce ambient and reiterative rhythms of materiality.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1178690
  3. Using Antenarrative to Uncover Systems of Power in Mid-20th Century Policies on Marriage and Maternity at IBM
    Abstract

    In this article, we use extant International Business Machines' internal communications to demonstrate how Boje’s notion of “antenarrative” can serve as a methodology for feminist historiography and as a way of uncovering forgotten and unchallenged systems of power and legitimacy in technical and professional communication. The antenarrative fragments of any official, sanctioned story give us insight into the ways in which power has been distributed throughout an organization and where agency can be claimed in real time. We also see that a methodology that considers the untold and unofficial stories of women in the workplace works to explain current distributions of power. This can be done by investigating the antenarratives that threaten to disrupt the prepackaged grand narrative of organizations; we show this specifically through a case study of International Business Machines' archival memos in contrast with the company’s website and public relations documents.

    doi:10.1177/0047281616639473

May 2016

  1. Hegelian Comedy
    Abstract

    AbstractThis article examines how rhetoric bears on Hegel's presentation of comedy. Although comedy succeeds tragedy in his catalogue of “romantic” arts, Hegel says little about it, a paradox mirrored in the secondary literature. Moreover, while Hegel's dialectic attests to his education in rhetoric in its staging of the multivalent image and its tracking of ironic, chiastic reversal of significance, the Aesthetics downplays any such performative element. I note Hegel's praise of Aristophanes, at odds with the dominant line of New Comedy: following the romantics, Hegel foregrounds human subjectivity in both action represented and audience reception. I summarize his position and then contrast its thematic bias with the Phenomenology's attention to form and pragmatics. Comedic discovery of self in “Art-religion” (chapter 7) prefigures self-presentation in the philosophical Idea, and confirms Hayden White's filing of Hegelian historiography under comedy. Anticipating Bergson, Hegel locates comedy on the margin between art and life, as philosophical regard merges with its object.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.49.2.0196
  2. Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom
    Abstract

    Deep Rhetoric is addressed to philosophy and rhetoric. And, like the journal, its questions emerge from the problem of a long-standing and uncomfortable conjunction, the “and” that divides and joins in one stroke. Over the course of eight chapters or a “series of closely related essays” (8), Crosswhite argues for a redefinition of rhetoric's place within our society's ethical imagination (giving it new “rights” to reason, justice, and wisdom, rights usually given to philosophy) and thereby returns rhetoric firmly to its original arena, the human condition. Such a recovery of rhetoric, if not its empowerment, grounds Crosswhite's concern for questions that philosophy shares with rhetoric only in a kind of grudging détente. It also says a great deal about his claim that rhetoric may be (or perhaps was all along) philosophy's best critic, offering us other ways way of loving wisdom, seeking justice, and contending with violence.A note on “deep:” Crosswhite's “deep” is both a move against philosophy and a gesture toward going “beyond” rhetoric as an academic discipline. Rhetoric began—like philosophy—amid the conditions of humanity: our questions of virtue, community, and communication of both. Rhetoric's migration into a university setting says less about its essences (one being its connection to teaching) and more about how education has shifted away from a concern with those conditions (3). Moreover, as Crosswhite notes, rhetoric has not been treated well in American higher education; it has been especially damaged by “destructive elitist” attitudes that simplify the complex “communication capabilities” needed for social life (3). Yet if rhetoric can go or become “deep” enough, Crosswhite argues, if it can do what it has always done all those times institutions have tried to kill it off—respond to controversies “for a specific time and in a specific place,” ‘hosting’ them as honest and useful (6)—then it will thrive. In the end, Crosswhite is after this fully “critical, creative, and truthful” rhetoric (177).Crosswhite solidifies rhetoric's “rapprochement” with philosophy (177) in chapters 5 and 6, an extensive and productive reading of Heidegger. The work of that German philosopher/rhetorician is one of many shared substances between the two schools of thought that Crosswhite gives attention to throughout the book. A typical review would summarize those substances and their attendant chapters, moving toward an analytical climax. Yet a fair reviewer knows such a limited space cannot do justice to Crosswhite's dense arguments, especially about Heidegger. And also Crosswhite covers some old ground. I will not rehearse his expansion on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1969 work (chapter 7). Readers of this journal know that Crosswhite organized and oversaw a special issue in 2010 about the legacy of The New Rhetoric.Crosswhite's individual chapters are not as important as his work on concepts that bring rhetoric into its “deeper” self. Crosswhite argues for a retrieval of four concepts “from millennia of philosophical and theological reifications” (79).1 It is these concepts—transcendence, psychagōgia, logos, and humanism—that deserve a reviewer's (and reader's) attention. Their development throughout the essays shows in a more direct way how this book situates itself within rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric and in relation to the progress that has been made in both of those arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. These concepts are not new to philosophy or rhetoric, but taken as a whole they define the “deepest” rhetoric.Crosswhite's rhetorical attention to these concepts highlights a significant difference between philosophy and rhetoric: he insists that rhetoric resist the urge for an epistemological telos, prominent in philosophy. Thus a “deep” rhetoric pursues a direction but acknowledges that such a pursuit consistently destabilizes any actual arriving. In that frame, Crosswhite expends the first one hundred pages or so (chapters 1 and 2) trying to name but not terminally define “deep rhetoric” through these concepts; the rescued concepts become mines in which Crosswhite repeatedly enters, not because he is looking for “gold” but because he wants to describe rhetoric as the work of mining. And so he claims rhetoric as a “way of being.” This claim is not new to rhetorical theory, but what makes Crosswhite's attempt so persuasive is the ambitiousness of the book as evidenced in the depth of the mining, which extends past the first two chapters, the concepts aiding his analysis of justice, violence, and wisdom. Along with this depth, the book's breadth also argues forcefully that one does not “study” rhetoric so much as live it, because its influence is felt across the human condition. That is what makes rhetoric philosophical or, better, what makes philosophy rhetorical. And the living is an entangled, material existence. Mixing humor and serious scholarship, for example, Crosswhite couples his close reading of Heidegger with an explanation of how silence and logos inhabit the manner in which he and his wife share a bed.Living amid others requires the practice of transcendence, the first of the key concepts. Crosswhite writes that rhetoric as transcendence is “a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change” (17). This participation is a meeting with each other “in language of some kind” (61), equal to “our being-in-logos” (56). In the eternal battle between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric's practice in the mundane (as opposed to philosophy's attachment to the ideal seen in Plato's heavenly visions) has been seen as a weakness. In Crosswhite's estimation this lack of heavenly transcendence is not a negative when seen through a different frame. Crosswhite argues that rhetoric is “something we are, not something we have” (61). This implies a different relationship to philosophy, one hidden by “knowledge” as a having. In addition, rhetorical transcendence has an “ethical force” because ethics is “constitutive of rhetoric” (107). That force certainly has something to do with “the good,” but it does not entail imposing that “good” on others through violence, physical or rhetorical. For Crosswhite the difference between an ethical transcendence and what he calls a “warrior theory of transcendence” is the latter's lack of restraint (117). This lack is best seen in Plato's description of Gorgias: he is a man who seeks “conquest and domination” along with wealth for himself (117), but ironically his rhetoric is not rhetorical enough. “Socrates' real charge against Gorgias's rhetoric is that it does not go deep enough” (124, emphasis his). In other words, rhetoric may have been a skill or “discipline” for the Sophist but not a manner of life and so less than ethical. That ethical manner of life is a constant communicative examination, a questioning of what we claim to know and put “under” our power. This opens us to something or someone else.This communicative examination is part of the second concept, psychagōgia. Translated as “leading the soul,” this Platonic notion is a “special power” of logos (different than its usual association with sophistic magic or spellbinding) that Crosswhite draws out from the gospel of John, known for its description of Logos as the Word of God. “Pros ton theon” (“toward the god”) becomes the lack of “possession or knowledge of an ultimate being” or “definite, certain, foreseeable, outcomes” (31) or a “not-having, a way of comporting oneself toward but not a way of actually knowing or grasping or achieving the goal” (30). This restraint is what makes this concept a rhetorical one rather than a philosophical one. Psychagōgia as a practice of “deep rhetoric” is “a life of pursuing and loving that stretches out toward wisdom but never arrives at it” (253). This “limited” power is a power “to which one must yield and not simply a power that one attempts to master and use for oneself” (133). Such a limitation makes rhetoric more ethical than its more end-orientated sister, philosophy. And a “deep rhetoric” internalizes this limitation on a primal level. One might suggest that what keeps philosophy grounded—that is, what prevents its heavenly transcendence—is its rhetorical “leading.”Psychagōgia is something “which we can never completely objectify” (131). This is because of its relation to logos, the third concept. Logos “moves in and against the semiotic languages of human beings; it makes them possible, but it works strongly against their certainties and ideologies” (79). Yet this “it” is not “a thing but a direction” (79). In terms of the gospel of John it is “the dynamic movement toward and into G-d,” and it must continue moving toward that which “will always exceed the forms of comprehension that lead toward it” (34). In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, rhetoric's “essence [as logos] is its onwardness” (79) or its experiencing of psychagōgia. This particular formation has implications for rhetoric as it continues its ethical turn. Rhetorical scholars have struggled indirectly with the content of rhetoric and so also with the content of its ethic. But if it is toward a good, if it is a leading toward, then rhetoric is not suspicious but in line with the w/Word as a calling toward. Such a leading toward enhances the power of language, a win for rhetoric.Or in Heidegger's thinking, rhetoric “is an awareness of” a logos, an awareness “deeper” that extends beyond the discipline, a “more original” logos of “communication, controversy, deliberation, and being-with-one-another—the essential sociality of Dasein” (195). This “ungrounded” logos (197) appears as Crosswhite pushes past what he sees as Heidegger's self-centered “authenticity” toward “a richer conception of logos and a more complex vision of sociality” (198). Conceptualizing “sociality” as that which is human, Crosswhite argues that human “beings” are not “simple entities, enclosed in themselves, but are movements toward and away from each other,” the world, themselves, and “whatever else their transcendence reveals” (174). These movements are both inherently rhetorical and ethical, movements toward a good.It is the movement of logos—the quintessence of rhetoric in a way—that violence puts to an end. And yet, in Crosswhite's opinion, rhetorical violence is often the response to physical violence. Here he contends with Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” suggesting that as much as it offers productive paths, it also is “intellectually traumatized” by the wars of the twentieth century and so is “an extreme example” of this tendency toward violence in response to violence (Benjamin argues for a divine violence that would overwhelm a mythic violence) (168–69). Crosswhite refuses any solution to violence (ontotheological or otherwise) and argues for a “suffering” rhetoric, one that experiences and endures violence (166). The best response to violence is a “deep rhetoric” that both prevents “overarching” theories and that is “carefully attuned” to a form of the human as sociality amid transcendence. Yet Crosswhite stumbles a bit here. At times his own analysis is as abstract as Benjamin's. More profoundly, although Crosswhite suggests that Benjamin needs a type of violence, many readers of Benjamin might disagree. Even if one accepts that Benjamin does indeed have such a need, the argument between the two is a larger one concerning rhetoric and religion. One cannot easily dismiss Benjamin's theological adherence to some form of messianic glory, Jewish or otherwise, merely because of the effects of war. And perhaps our lack of intellectual traumatization due to the wars of the twenty-first century says more than we let on. In the end, many religions answer violence with a “suffering” savior. Ironically, Crosswhite describes his response to violence as a more human, “less ultimate” work of justice and peace, a kenosis ironically not unlike that of the primary character in the gospel of John.On the other hand, Crosswhite's argument against violence certainly has value and legitimacy, and it grounds his central claim on a related subject: humans need to do more work (rhetorical and otherwise) to effect justice. However, when Crosswhite dabbles in religious rhetoric (along with the gospel on John, he draws on Augustine, Buddhist meditation, and the Hebraic tradition to develop his idea of rhetorical wisdom in the last chapter), he does not go deep enough. He draws from these rhetorical depths, but he seems to stop at moments when they could offer more. Ironically, as Crosswhite shows in his interaction with wisdom in the last chapter, it is religion in part that makes possible his most substantial critique of Heidegger, namely, that Heidegger does not go deep enough into human sociality. In fairness Crosswhite notes that he has worked to show the “formal similarities” of explicit religious rhetoric to his own “deep rhetoric” (366) but also admits he could only give a “preliminary account” of this relationship (367). In a less than generous reading, the whole book itself is only a “preliminary account” of a deep rhetoric, leaving readers wanting more. In a generous reading, this is exactly what a philosophical rhetoric is supposed to do: keep the conversation moving. In other words, as with most of our best scholarship, its strength is also its weakness.The last of Crosswhite's four concepts—humanism—certainly poses the questions that religion does but does not define the human exclusively in religious terms. Like a rhetorical justice, the “human” and its attendant wisdom is “for a time” (54). For Crosswhite, humanism is not about “realizing a specifically human essence,” such as rationality, but about “struggling for human dignity,” dignity here being understood as a freedom to develop (46). Deep rhetoric thus must “prevent its own humanism from congealing into something reified and dogmatic” (56). Humanism is not just dynamic but also ethical, limiting itself, and thereby making itself accountable to others. This is the human condition to which a deep rhetoric “aspires” (222), a condition achievable, yet always achieved kairotically, within time, space, and logos. Many rhetorical scholars could enthusiastically embrace this definition, mainly because it emphasizes both a looking back and a future orientation.In the end Deep Rhetoric is certainly a virtuous keystone (perhaps not yet a capstone) to the long process of “mining” within Crosswhite's thinking that began with his own dissertation on Heidegger nearly thirty years ago. It is also a broad survey of the ways in which rhetoric can and should become a different kind of philosophy, its own kind. The book is both deep and wide, and its movement steers us toward something that can be called good. If indeed this is a sustained direction for rhetorical theory in the future (and I hope it is), Crosswhite's book will be read for a long time.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.49.2.0221
  3. Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece
    Abstract

    In the latest Oxford World Classic edition of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2015), a painting of the beautiful adorns the cover. The slope of the neck, the curve of the back, it focuses on the form of the beautiful in performance. Seven years earlier, in 2008, the same book, in the same series, imaged the sublime on its cover. Snow falls on pines, the rocks of mountaintops loom in the background; it is meant to evoke the power of the dynamic sublime. Nathan Crick’s challenging new book, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece, completes a similar transition in classical scholarship by moving aesthetic theories of historiography from the rupture of the sublime, like the history of Victor Vitanza, to the forms of the beautiful, like those that support the history of John Poulakos. Crick does aesthetic through a series of close readings of archaic and classical Greek literary, philosophic, and traditionally rhetorical texts ranging from works by Homer to Aristotle. In these readings, he looks not to philology but rather constructs a history of how these texts key to contemporary definitions of power, rhetoric, and politics. It is thus a conceptual history that, in the end, seeks to persuade us that “the faith of rhetoric is that through the power of speech we can recognize our interdependence in a contingent world and seek, together, to constitute a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226).As with most modernist conceptions of the beautiful, like those in Schiller, Crick’s is one that founds itself on the essentialism of both the text and the properties of humanity. Rhetoric and Power begins its first chapter with a reading of Homer that demonstrates how an oral culture creates a virtue that is always bound with divinity. The wandering minstrel has power; he alone gets to stand before the people and remind them how heroes act. In chapter two, Crick considers how the rise of a literate culture influences history. He focuses especially on Heraclitus’s we “can’t stop in the same river twice,” which he reads as containing within it, because of the form of the aphorism, the power to “wake up” individuals to the wisdom of a contingent, as distinguished from a divine, world. Tragedy in Aeschylus, because of the nature of hubris, converges the oral virtue of the Homeric world with the aphoristic insistence that reason cannot rest on divinity. It is in this convergence that rhetoric is first manifest “as a medium by which power is challenged, destroyed, created, and transformed” (60). Protagoras, in chapter four, snatches the scales of justice and the right of retribution from the gods and delivers them to humans, for Protagoras’s words were able to “articulate a political framework … that gave rational justification for putting … multiple perspectives into meaningful communication with each other in order to collectively measure the affairs of the polis” (65). Gorgias’s logical structure takes up chapter five, where his demonstration of all possible causes contains within itself the possibility to break and create anew different orders in symbolic chains of meaning. The history of Thucydides shows justice as “a consequence of power relationships” (155, emphasis in the original), which requires us to contemplate the good action of the present as part of the drama of history. In chapter seven, Aristophanes’s Old Comedy essentializes humans as fallible; Crick concludes, “We are comic creatures precisely because we are always striving to be something greater than what we are” (140); in so doing, Aristophanes allows humans to forgive the error of leaders who incorrectly judge the drama of history. Plato’s dialectic performs “tragicomedy” within his Protagoras, in Crick’s chapter eight, which introduced a “new relationship between rhetoric and power” (168), as the form that allows individuals to turn to the masses and question whether their actions truly conform to “the beautiful state” (162). In chapter nine, Crick credits Isocrates and writing with embedding rhetoric through the human world. Aristotle, then, in the last close reading of the book, contains within his canon the “means by which the competing ends of power and of truth are reconciled through the progressive constitution of the good life” (214).Because it is a history that emphasizes the beautiful, Crick’s history predictably excises violence from power and therefore from rhetoric. This pacification of right communication begins in the introduction, where Crick uses Prometheus Bound to justify an Arendtian separation of violence and power. Violence is an instrument for manipulating material toward an end; power is the capacity for humans to act in concert and “witness a beginning” (91). Rhetoric, then, is the “facilitator” and “medium” of this beneficent power. Rhetoric is, on Crick’s reading, “the artistry of power” and can either be a force for social collectivity or the means for division and conflict. Crick supports this claim with a quotation from the “Chorus to Prometheus” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “So why lavish all your gifts on humans when you can’t take prudent care of yourself? Once you’ve shucked off these bonds I think you’ll be no less powerful than overweening Zeus” (5). As Prometheus is chained to the Caucuses at this time, Crick notes that the only power the chorus could speak of at this moment is the power of speech. This interpretation ignores the fact that Prometheus would first need to “shuck off” the chains. In his discussion of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Crick rejects readings that see Gorgias as criticizing those who would take Helen by force; on Crick’s reading, Gorgias’s targets are “Homeric poets” and their “barbaric violence” (83). In Aristophanes’s Birds, the violence of Pisthetairos’ consuming the “jailbirds” is not power or rhetoric, but force, as the eating is an instrument to preserve continued rule. In fact, for Crick, the scene demonstrates the impossibility of rhetoric to act as a preservation of rule in an oral culture.Crick’s interpretive devotion to the split between power and violence leads to a rather odd moment in his discussion of Isocrates. Because Nicocles was penned rather than spoken, it can perform the function of “power maintenance”; the oral rule of Pisthetairos could not because it can institute a “social contract.” Unlike under Hobbes’s contract, the ruled receive not a freedom from violence, but rather the identification of their place in the hierarchy of virtue. In contradistinction to democracy, which allows the “best to pass unnoticed,” monarchy raises to higher levels those “whose habits and accomplishments can act as exemplars for the rest of the people” (189) because it allows the hegemon to keep detailed written records of all of the ruled. In this way, the ruler is able to prevent revolutions and arrange the people based on their adherence to codified law. In Evagoras, “the goal remains the establishment of a system of perfect surveillance” (188). This surveillance, though, is not violent, as it is in Hobbes. Instead, it “becomes a means of collective regulation in order to form a stable society in harmony with the hegemonic Logos” (190). This contract, however, is not without the threat of violence. Even Crick notes, “Nicocles would have inherited the proto-police system of which the people would have been all too familiar, making [Isocrates’s] suggestion that his thoughts (and eyes) would be present in their deliberations quite literal” (180). How this is not violent is lost on the reader, particularly when Crick quotes again from Nicocles a passage that is a statement of at least symbolic violence, “[d]o not keep silent if you see any who are disloyal to my rule, but expose them; and believe that those who aid in concealing crime deserve the same punishment as those who commit it” (190). Yet, Crick still maintains that there is a split between violence and power here. It is because of this split that Crick is able, in an offhand comment, to dismiss the claim of Victor Vitanza that Isocrates’s system of rhetoric, power, and politics is inherently fascist.Because Isocrates’s system is not violence perpetrated by the state, but instead merely a ranking of citizens from most to least virtuous, the surveillance system of Isocrates can be used by both the ruled and the ruler. We see this again in the conclusion, when Crick, echoing the call from Kalbfleisch’s 2013 article in Advances, claims that historians of rhetoric need to “fully comprehend how the development of print, radio, photography, the telegraph, the press, the telephone, the movie, the computer, and the revolution in communication technologies” (224) changes how the “universal” forms of rhetoric manifest. This is requisite for Crick because without it we will not be able to adequately conceptualize the ways new contingent articulations of people acting in concert can articulate themselves closer to the Platonic three: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Trying to look for a rhetoric that is not one of the “universal” is, according to Crick, exchanging history for propaganda. Some might object to this claim, valuable as it is in its appropriate context, given that often in the Arendtian conception of power, “people acting in concert” includes only those whom the state would qualify as people. It was certainly a political reality at the time, as Crick notes in his introduction, that not everyone counted as human and there was nothing they could do to gain more worth in the hierarchy of the state.Despite my reservations, as an aesthetic reading of rhetoric’s history and the role rhetoric played in human emancipation from the divine, Rhetoric and Power is imaginative and original. If I were to adopt it for teaching, I would put this work with Poulakos and Haskins, juxtaposed against Grimaldi, Gross, Schiappa and Graff. Certainly the work contributes well to the ongoing debate in the field about the nature of history, historiography, and the tradition.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1187525
  4. Finding the Grimkés in Charleston: Using Feminist Historiographic and Archival Research Methods to Build Public Memory
  5. Beyond Basic Reading and Writing: The People’s House and the Political Literacy Education of the Student-Activists of the Black Liberation Front International, 1968-1975
    Abstract

    In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.

    doi:10.21623/1.4.1.3
  6. Emerging Voices: The Geographies of History: Space, Time, and Composition
    Abstract

    This article investigates the spatial politics at work in composition and rhetoric's turn toward revisionist historiography. Drawing on critical spatial theory, the author seeks to answer a fundamental question: What would it mean to formulate a historiography for composition that brings an interrelation of space and time, of spatial and historical work, to the fore? This article expedites this foregrounding by highlighting the ways in which the divisions between time and space have already grown increasingly tenuous in our revisionist historical scholarship and by providing this interrelatedness a vocabulary—a space-time hermeneutic—to highlight and predict its theoretical and political implications.

    doi:10.58680/co201628525

April 2016

  1. Knowing (Y)Our Story: Practicing Decolonial Rhetorical History
  2. Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology for Queer and Feminist Historiography
    Abstract

    Engaging with feminist rhetorical methodologies of critical imagination and interdisciplinary queer studies of gossip, this essay theorizes gossip as a methodology for feminist and queer historiography in rhetoric. Gossip as historiographic practice is then illustrated through the example of its uses to develop a queer history of rhetorical education and women’s epistolary practices.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1142845

March 2016

  1. Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400–1500 by Matthew Kempshall, and: Orosius and the Rhetoric of History by Peter Van Nuffelen
    Abstract

    216 RHETORICA del fratello di Guizzardo, i Flores veritatis gramatice di Bertoluccio (sopra ricordato), conservata anche in altri due manoscritti (e attribuita a Gentile da Cingoli in un altro ms.). Lo studio di quest'opera che, secondo il giudizio di Gian Carlo Alessio, è "un manuale costruito coi modelli della grammatica speculativa", sarebbe molto intéressante perché potrebbe costituire il legame tra la tradizione di riflessione grammaticale, importata probabilmente tra i maestri delle arti e medicina di Bologna da Gentile da Cingoli (il maestro di Angelo di Arezzo), e la tradizione di insegnamento della grammatica e della retorica (dictamen) di ámbito giuridico-notarile che convivevano a Bologna, non sempre in buoni rapporti. COSTANTINO MARMO, BOLOGNA Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500, Manchester University Press, 2012, x + 627 pp. ISBN 9780719070310 Peter Van Nuffelen, Orosius and the Rhetoric of History, Oxford University Press, 2012, viii + 252 pp. ISBN 9780199655274 In recent years, scholarly attitudes towards writers of history in the late antique and medieval period have undergone a fundamental series of trans­ formations. It is no longer sufficient to describe these individuals as mere imi­ tators of a glorious classical historiographical tradition, using tools that they only barely understood with limited success. Nor can they be unreflectively dismissed simply as polemicists and moralizers, subject to the particular pressures that attended an overly-literal reception of Biblical themes and models. The two books under review here add further fuel to a revisionist reading of medieval historiography by focusing upon the ways in which authors could strategically utilize techniques of argumentation and presenta­ tion drawn from the training in rhetoric and grammar that underpinned the literary culture of the period. Matthew Kempshall's Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500 is a magisterial, synthetic introduction to the subject, aimed principally at students and scholars new to the field and encompassing some 550 pages of elegantly written, exhaustively supported argumentation. In his Orosius and the Rhetoric ofHistory, meanwhile, Peter Van Nuffelen offers a collection of carefully drawn interpretative vignettes which seek to engage scholars of both historiography and Christian literature of the period, and, in the process, to redirect the focus of Orosian scholarship by placing him within the context of secular, as well as Christian, historiography of the fifth and sixth centuries. Both projects are, therefore, explicitly rehabilitative in nature: Kempshall's to demonstrate that medieval historiography was neither crude nor credulous nor conceptually unsophisticated" (536), and Van Nuffelen's to deliver Orosius from the accusation that he was an unimaginative, unintelligent theologian who fundamentally misunderstood the works of his patron, Augustine of Reviews 217 Hippo. Both authors go about their projects by emphasizing the close and enduring relationship between the writing of history and the practices, concerns, and techniques of classical rhetoric. In particular, both acknowledge and build upon existing arguments about the extensive and substantial influ­ ence of manuals of rhetoric (particularly Cicero, Quintilian, and the pseudoCiceronian Rhetonoi iid Hei'eniiiimi) on the education that authors of the period received. For Kempshall, the pervasiveness of classical rhetoric in medieval thought and literature should not be understood as a black mark against the veracity, reliability, or integrity of practitioners of the period. On the contrary, the principles of deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative rhetoric provided the writers of history with the tools that thev needed in order to fulfill the tripartite objective of history: to teach, to move, and to please. After first outlining the immense diversity of texts that are collected together under the rubric of medi­ eval historiography and the fundamental forms and objectives of the three types of classical rhetoric that authors of those texts might be expected to be familiar with, Kempshall proceeds to explore in detail the principles and tech­ niques of classical rhetoric, and the texts and contexts in which they can be found in historical writing of the period. In the process, he also questions and begins upon a deconstruction of the tendency to identify the 12th and 15th centuries as w atershed moments in the history of medieval historiographv . While he agrees that the intellectual and cultural developments of those centuries do mark significant points in the dev elopment of medieval...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2016.0019

January 2016

  1. Demosthenes as Text: Classical Reception and British Rhetorical History
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT British rhetorical theorists demonstrate a persistent interest in Demosthenes, but their interpretations of his significance reflect different understandings of rhetoric. This article uses reception theory to illuminate how British depictions of Demosthenes at different moments in history reflect writers’ values and rhetorical aims. The focus on Demosthenes as a model of rhetorical prowess becomes particularly important for nineteenth-century British theorists who conceive of rhetoric as an individualistic display of linguistic virtuosity. Viewing Demosthenes through the lens of reception history reveals the inherent instability of a disciplinary history that is not only shaped by important figures, but also constructs those figures in ways that reflect shifting scholarly values.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1137249
  2. Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action
    Abstract

    Over twenty years ago in William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary Copeland’s edited volume, Critical Questions, Thomas W. Benson likened his research to doing “part of society’s homework” (185). The ends of scholarship, he suggested, were to encourage others to reflect critically upon social practices and the institutions that invite them. In Posters for Peace, Benson performs this homework by analyzing posters he collected and saved in May 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. These posters protested President Richard Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia, despite earlier assurances that he would deescalate U.S. military action in Vietnam. Benson situates these artifacts in a longer rhetorical tradition of poster use and compares them with another instance of ephemeral war protest: the graffiti he observed in Rome during a 2004 protest of the Iraq War. Throughout his analysis, Benson also weaves an account of disciplinary shifts during the early 1970s, which made analyses of visual rhetoric possible in the first place. Thus, Benson offers both a rhetorical history and history of rhetoric in Posters for Peace.As the author of a rhetorical history, Benson begins by describing the context in which these posters were produced. He identifies a few antecedents that may have influenced the use of posters at Berkeley. Most immediately, the Berkeley artists were likely inspired by the 1968 Paris protestors’ posters, as well as the psychedelic posters circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Benson also notes the U.S. government’s substantial use of posters during the 1930s and 40s to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and national unity during World War II. The extent to which the Berkeley protests were inspired directly by these government posters is unclear, though Benson ably demonstrates a preexisting tradition of political poster use in the U.S. Significantly, his inclusion of a White House photograph of Nixon delivering his Cambodia address underscores the political importance of posters during the 1970s. In this photograph, the president points to a map of Cambodia while justifying military action. In a way, then, the Berkeley protesters countered Nixon’s visual rhetoric with some of their own.Following Benson’s extended essay, Posters for Peace contains full-page color reproductions of the 66 posters he saved. The Berkeley posters are mostly original art on silk-screen, though some are based on photographs or employ photo offset printing. Many of these are visually stunning. One does not get the sense that they were produced for posterity, however. Most of them were printed on the backside of used tractor-feed printer paper or whatever cardstock was handy. They were distributed freely and ended up on fences, dorm room walls, picket signs, and so forth. Some of them were preserved in Benson’s own private collection until 2008, when he donated them to the Penn State University Libraries on the condition that they were “freely available for nonprofit educational uses” (4).Most of the posters in Benson’s collection are antiwar. Some, however, advocate for civil rights in the U.S. Although Benson arranges the color reproductions of these posters in a roughly thematic fashion, he does not adhere strictly to this sequence in his analysis. Instead, he often skips around, thereby knitting them together as a cohesive unit. For instance, on pages 41–42 he references plates 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33, 13, and 27—in that order. His analysis identifies inventional similarities between them. Moreover, this approach has the additional benefit of tacitly promoting a disruptive reading of the posters by encouraging readers to view them in no fixed order.In his analysis, Benson attempts to recover the meanings that a passersby would have understood in 1970. He finds much to praise in these posters. Although posters are often classified as tools of propaganda, Benson observes that, “many of the Berkeley posters invoke a reflexivity about their own persuasion and call for discussion beyond the poster—asking not merely for belief or action, but for speech, participation, deliberation” (48). To a modern eye, the posters’ emphasis on civic deliberation may be easily taken for granted. At the time, however, prominent politicians such as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew sought to curtail criticisms of the war in Vietnam by associating the antiwar movement as unpatriotic and unrepresentative of U.S. public opinion. In Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, for instance, he described the antiwar protesters as a fervent “vocal minority” and juxtaposed them with a patriotic “silent majority,” who, he claimed, supported his own strategy in Vietnam. The best citizen, Nixon suggested, was a silent one. Benson’s analysis both demonstrates and celebrates the students’ determination to speak out and legitimize their opposition to the war.Similarly to the tumultuous political climate that birthed the Berkeley protest posters, the speech-communication discipline underwent substantial change in the early 1970s. According to Benson, The discipline, while not abandoning its interest in Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric, was already moving rapidly in other directions, seeking to understand rhetoric from the point of view of the citizen whose judgment was being solicited, recovering marginal voices, asking questions about the ethics of persuasion, investigating the rhetorical action of non-oratorical forms, pressing forward on the close reading of rhetorical texts, and inquiring about empirical matters such as the preparation, circulation, and reception of rhetoric. (54)To demonstrate this shift, Benson identifies Robert P. Newman’s, Hermann Stelzner’s, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s, and Forbes I. Hill’s rhetorical analyses of the “Silent Majority” speech. Benson also highlights the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, which met in 1970 to discuss the scope of rhetoric and the appropriate means for studying it. More precisely, these meetings helped legitimize scholarship that examined non-oratorical forms. Benson’s analysis of the Berkeley posters is particularly fitting in that he collected them the same month that he attended Pheasant Run. In so doing, Benson returns readers to a historic intersection of war protests, visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory.Despite Benson’s presence at Berkeley and Pheasant Run, his analysis abstains from auto-ethnography. Indeed, Benson does not mention until the last two pages of Posters for Peace that he attended Pheasant Run. Glimmers of this project’s personal significance shine throughout, nonetheless. For instance, Benson incorporates nearly thirty photographs he took of visual rhetoric protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These photographs are helpful for illustrating his argument. Their layout could have been stronger in his section on the Roman graffiti, however. Although Benson concludes his discussion of the graffiti on page 83, photographs from Rome appear on each subsequent page until page 95. One suspects that these photographs of graffiti could have been condensed into one section. Moreover, two photographs of the Roman Pasquino statue (figures 34 and 35) appear redundant. These are minor issues, however, in an otherwise well-structured book.Posters for Peace gives readers pause to consider the role of archives in rhetorical scholarship. In recent years, the term archive has expanded within the humanities to encompass not simply institutional collections, such as those found at presidential libraries, but also those created by scholars in the course of their research. What makes Benson’s book exceptional is that he illustrates both senses of the word archive. Insofar as these posters and photographs are freely available in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries, other scholars may make recourse to these historically significant artifacts. Additionally, Posters for Peace may serve as a model for scholars who are interested in preserving the ephemeral texts they study.Several years ago, in Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope’s edited collection on visual rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric Communication and American Culture, Benson invited students and scholars alike to note the significance of visual texts—exclaiming, “Look, Rhetoric!” In Posters for Peace, Benson demonstrates first-hand the value of this exhortation—both in his analysis and in creation of an archive of ephemeral visual texts. Scholars interested in visual rhetoric, protest rhetoric, or rhetorical history will profit greatly from reading Benson’s book. It is well written and offers a unique retrospective of the academic and political discussions in the early 1970s. Inasmuch as Benson offers a glimpse into the theoretical changes then afoot in speech communication, I suspect that this volume will be of special importance to young scholars as they navigate disciplinary narratives. In short, Posters for Peace is sure to inspire scholars and inform their own work as they complete part of society’s homework, too.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1138752
  3. Editor’s Statement
    Abstract

    I am honored to be the fourth editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric (AHR). I walk in the shadow of distinguished predecessors, and I pledge imitation as the currency of my respect and gratitude. One can never equal the contribution of a founder, but to Rich Enos, who began Advances in 2002 and served for six years, I pledge to continue his expressed and enacted commitment to encouraging, aiding, and then publishing the work of beginning scholars. By his example, Robert Gaines, editor from 2004–2011, teaches me to be a proactive editor—not to depend for the content of the journal exclusively on what comes in through the transom but to create platforms for experienced scholars to address timely questions in colloquies and to invite and publish translations and critical editions as well as thesis-driven essays. Katya Haskins, who served from 2012–2015, made special issues a regular feature of the journal, a practice that I will continue, but even more importantly worked intentionally to expand the scope of Advances to ensure a robust and inclusive understanding of “the tradition” in terms of the periods emphasized, national literatures covered, and the media examined under the sign of rhetoric. I hope to publish any quality work in rhetoric that benefits from being examined through an historical lens. I also welcome the work of graduate students, will initiate a regular invitation to submit proposals on special issues, and will regularly publish book reviews and invited essays that assess the state of the research on particular period or topic.I encourage scholars working on topics related to historical rhetoric to submit their essays to AHR. I promise you a fair and quick review process. If your essay is accepted and published it will be available to patrons of the over 2000 libraries that subscribe to one of the Taylor & Francis packages that includes AHR.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2016.1138733
  4. A Rhetoric of Remnants: Idiots, Half-Wits, and Other State-Sponsored Inventions, Zosha Stuckey: New York: SUNY Press, 2014. 176 pages. $80.00 hardcover.
    Abstract

    This book argues that education is fundamentally rhetorical, that rhetoric is key to social justice, and that doing rhetorical history is methodologically complicated. To make these arguments, Zosh...

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1107935
  5. Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric ed. by Michelle Baliff
    Abstract

    Reviews 115 of the high Middle Ages, Scholastics, scholars of the emergent scientific rex olution, and authors of the great late medieval vernacular literary works all had distinctly different understandings, valorizations, and usages of sense-derived knowledge and the category of 'experience'. This observation would, I think, impact Carruthers' analysis of the stylistic notion of 'curiositas ', particularly in relation to Bernard of Clairvaux (pp. 149-150): the cita­ tions from Bernard suggest a response to 'curiositas' as much ethical as aesthetic/ I do not mean these comments to detract from what is clearly a bril­ liant and erudite study of the aesthetic pleasure readers took in rhetorically constructed texts in the Middle Ages. My concern is not about Carruthers' analysis so much as her positioning of it under the critical terms 'Beauty' and 'Experience'. A title like 'The Pleasure of Aesthetic Judgments in the Middle Ages', though less impactful, might have captured the nature of the argument more accurately. I strongly recommend this book to all inter­ ested in the aesthetic reception of rhetorical texts in the Middle Ages and invite them to take the thought-provoking iter laid out for them by Profes­ sor Carruthers. Their experience of beauty along the way will be, in the way of experience, for them alone to judge. Juanita Feros Ruys Michelle Baliff, ed.z Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. 238 pp. ISBN 9780809332106 Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric is well-conceived collection of essays on historiography. Most of the essays review the literature relevant to the area of historiography addressed and illustrate the historiographic principles considered with an example. These features, probably the result of editor Baliff's nudging, make the collection appealing as a textbook for a graduate course. Both Baliff in her "Introduction" and Sharon Crowley in the "After­ word" recall the heady days of the 1980s and 90s when historiography inspired passionate debate, contrasting those times with the current scene. The questions debated then were of three types: (1) Political: What principles of selection led to the creation histories that were racist and sexist? (2) Formal: Should a historiography be suspicious of a narrative of a tradition with "tra­ dition's" inherent propensity to mask fissures and occlude determinative local, situational factors? (3) Generic: Should the historian attempt to recon­ struct the past in its own terms, muting the historian's voice? Or should we frankly and freely appropriate the past for our own ends? The contributors to this volume address these same issues, and if, at the philosophical level, 7This in contrast to Carruthers' assertion that the terms of rhetoric 'are less assessments of states of being or of ethical worth than of sensory affect (p. 45). 116 RHETORICA the answers to these questions seem more settled, differences in approach and emphasis are still important. All the contributors directly or implicitly welcome the expansion of the rhetorical tradition and applaud the critique of rhetoric's traditional norms as sexist, racist, heteronormative, and ethnocentric. In her chapter, Jessica Enoch helpfully divides and categorizes the critique under the rubrics of "recovery" and "re-reading," but she also complains that the current histo­ riography cannot accommodate gendered readings of the rhetoric of public memory and the gendered nature of the architecture of certain sites of typi­ cal rhetorical performance—literatures she reviews. Byron Hawk supports recovery work but seems bored with it, characterizing the effort to "retrieve the excluded" as having become a "bureaucratic mandate" (110). Hawk is impatient: the recovery work of the last twenty years has merely fit more figures into the familiar teleological narrative. He calls for more radical his­ toriographies and histories. Hawk primarily objects to teleology, and he suggests principles of a his­ toriography that would resist teleology and produce radically subjective, performative histories. A properly postmodern historiography would be compatible with the new materialism (Deleuze and Guattari) and with (non-teleological) complexity theories that have characterized recent work across humanities disciplines. Hawk finds a source of inspiration for such a historiography in the writings on improvisation of music theorist and jazz musician David Borgo. He claims his model would ultimately produce "bot­ toms up"(120) histories that would identify discrete moments...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2016.0029

December 2015

  1. Gendered Geographies of Memory: Place, Violence, and Exigency at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
    Abstract

    Abstract Although scholars recognize the importance of recovery projects that aim to recenter women’s roles in black freedom struggles, when it comes to these memory practices, the “woman problem” of civil rights memory is more acknowledged than understood. This essay argues that memories of civil rights movements are mapped spatially and rhetorically to depict correlations among Jim Crow contexts and acts of black resistance. The relationship among these spatial and rhetorical configurations is termed the “rhetorical geography of memory.” Through an account of the rhetorical geography of memory of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, this essay posits that place, violence, and masculinity animate a relationship between exigency and response, producing a gendered landscape of memory that limits at the outset the conditions and possibilities for women’s emergence.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0621
  2. Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement
    Abstract

    Book Review| December 01 2015 Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement. By Anne Marie Todd. New York: Routledge, 2013; pp. 168. $135.00 cloth. James Coleman McGuffey James Coleman McGuffey Indiana University, Bloomington Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (4): 763–766. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0763 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation James Coleman McGuffey; Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2015; 18 (4): 763–766. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0763 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. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0763
  3. Prototypical Reading: Volume, Desire, Anxiety
    Abstract

    This essay explores the pedagogical project of integrating digital archival research into the undergraduate classroom. We contend that rather than simply asking students to

    doi:10.58680/ccc201527643

October 2015

  1. What Happens When Literary Critics and Scientists Converse?
    Abstract

    This article discusses a collaborative course at Davidson College titled Representations of HIV/AIDS. With students, the authors look at the over thirty-year-old history of HIV/AIDS and the interwoven scientific and artistic responses to it. Not simply analyzing representations of HIV/AIDS from their disciplinary perspectives, however, they each interrogate the other's knowledge from their own position, both informing and learning as coteachers and fellow students. Their strategies also include organizing the course by issues salient to HIV/AIDS rather than major scientific/historical landmark events as might be traditionally defined; continually interrogating the historiography of HIV/AIDS; emphasizing the diverse identities and lived experiences of HIV/AIDS; exploring how stigma can thwart science and oppress others and how that has been answered by the arts; discussing concepts (such as patient zero) that, while useful for the scientist or artist, can still be problematic; and understanding how economics impacts both the art and science of HIV/AIDS. In the course students take on a prominent role as active critical thinkers, and their critical explorations of HIV/AIDS always occur at the intersection of art and science. This course imparts to students vital lessons in a world where complex global problems will increasingly demand interdisciplinary, collaborative solutions.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2917121

September 2015

  1. Assimilative Rhetorics in 19th Century African American Literacy Manuals
    Abstract

    Near the end of the 19th century, literacy manuals were marketed to African Americans who sought to improve their reading and writing skills outside of a traditional classroom setting. I argue these texts had a worthwhile goal of providing literacy instruction for learners, but they were problematic in that they also served as a source for assimilation into the dominant white culture. Via archival research methods, I examine three of these manuals to discuss how they taught literacy in addition to assimilating students regarding family, politics, and religion—a marked difference from more traditional literacy instruction in the classroom. The lessons represented the idea that discrimination was not necessarily a problem caused by whites but the result of a moral deficit on the part of African Americans. One selection, “Politics,” published in Hall’s Moral and Mental Capsule (1905), edited by Josie Hall, an African American teacher, instructs, “I think it would have been better far/If the Negro had let politics alone/For the first thing he needed was a home/An education and clothes” (173). Another text Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge (1897), written and published solely by James T. Haley, an African American publisher, seems to be the exception, emphasizing a sense of community through point-counterpoints on language used to reference African Americans. These texts raise questions of how writing instruction past and present may assimilate students through the complicated idea of bettering oneself through education. I conclude that the texts represent a still-present paradox in education; the social advantages students seek are often unattainable without some adoption of dominant social mores, even though it may unknowingly imply a student’s own cultural identity is somehow deficient.

    doi:10.59236/rjv15i1pp41-60
  2. The Missing Rhetorical History Between Quintilian and Augustine
    Abstract

    Current histories of rhetoric neglect the early Christian period (ca. 30–430 CE) in several crucial ways-Augustine is overemphasized and made to serve as a summary of Christian thought rather than an endpoint, the texts of church fathers before 300 CE are neglected or lumped together, and the texts of the New Testament are left unexamined. An alternative outline of early Christian rhetoric is offered, explored through the angles of political self-invention, doctrinal ghostwriting, apologetics, and fractured sermonization. Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion that eventually made peace with classical rhetoric, but as a rhetorical force in its own right, and comprised of more factions earlv on than just the apostolic church.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2015.0001

August 2015

  1. Head Bumps to Brain Scans: A Visual Rhetorical History of Scientific Surveillant Looking

July 2015

  1. Tasting Freedom
    Abstract

    I shall begin by speaking of our ancestors … [who] by their courage and their virtues, have handed … on to us a free country.—“Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Thucydides, History of thePeloponnesian War, 2.36Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free.—Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of MotivesCome, taste freedom with us.—Pussy Riot, “Death to the Jails, Freedom to the Protests”Freedom is a big, broad word—a capacious concept. It seems open and welcoming, frank and approachable. Such a natural pairing: rhetoric and freedom. There is an invitational gesture of sorts in each of the three passages that begin this piece: the speakers/writers offer to give over a polis, a choice, a collective experience to savor.For Pericles the gift of freedom is consolation and justification for the losses of war; for Burke (1950), freedom is the precondition of choice and will, essential to his sense of the human; Pussy Riot, on a more celebratory note, extends an invitation to freedom’s banquet but tacitly acknowledges that that invitation needs to be accepted. The sixty and more rhetoricians who gathered to mull over this pairing of rhetoric and freedom in San Antonio in May 2014 at the biennial symposium of the American Society of the History of Rhetoric brought with them that open spirit—a utopian urge to pursue freedom as a ground, a practice, and a potential outcome of rhetorical action. They also brought their deep rhetorical knowledge of the complexities of this subject: their awareness that this long-standing relationship between rhetoric and freedom is paradoxical, fraught with deception, and at times a spur to violence.The distortions of the term in political/popular discourse since 9/11 suggest that the time is right for a scholarly return to “freedom.” Casting himself as “author” of and “worker” for freedom, George W. Bush (2003) has now branded his own presidency and its legacy as a “Freedom Agenda.” Can freedom be authored, or forced, by one state onto another? Does “working for” freedom through military invasion not constitute the most basic violation of freedom? Although it is unlikely that such questions will be posed within the Bush Institute, a think tank “separately managed” by the Bush Foundation over the objections of trustees at Southern Methodist University adjacent to which it is housed (Traub 2009), we rhetoricians have the space, time, and conditions for contemplating and working through questions that the creation and naming of the Bush Institute raises. What is the relationship between freedom and the state, especially states that purport to be democratic? What are the personal conditions that enable rhetorical acts? Who are rhetorical persons and to what extent can we grasp their “freedom,” or lack thereof? And what will we rhetorical beings, or at least some of us, risk to win the pleasures and rewards of collective freedom?The articles brought together here, expanded versions of talks delivered at the symposium, explore these questions through an impressively diverse range of rhetorical approaches. To get a grasp on rhetoric and freedom, as these scholars demonstrate so compellingly, requires making fine distinctions, paying close, critical attention to stance and voice in historical texts and material culture, especially with regard to the state (Pernot; Lamp); it requires attending to questions about rhetorical personhood in relationship to governance as presented in Early Modern and Enlightenment political philosophy (O’Gorman; Stroud; Allen); and it demands that we direct our analysis beyond the page to the significance of space and body in the performance of protest under conditions of unfreedom (Trasciatti; Haskins). In what follows I introduce the articles offered here by reflecting on the topoi of freedom and rhetoric emerging from them—as a report on what I have learned from them and in hopes of framing and enhancing your reading experience.Freedom enters into rhetorical history and theory early on through a founding statement and performance of Athenian democracy: the funeral oration Thucydides (1954) attributes to Pericles, Athenian general and statesman, delivered early in the course of the war against Sparta, 431 BCE. Honoring the first to fall in the traditional state funeral, Pericles offers an encomium of the polis that celebrates several different kinds of freedom. As soon as he designates Athens as a free country (in the epigraph above), Pericles notes with praise that the fathers added to the city an empire; thus, the freedom of the first democracy was from the beginning contaminated by conquest and slavery. It is appropriate then that our issue begins with studies of the constraints on free speech and expression under empire. Laurent Pernot unveils the intricate processes through which Greek rhetors under the Roman empire were able to weave critical perspectives into their orations: a practice of using “figured discourse.” Kathleen S. Lamp approaches the question of freedom and captivity from the Roman side, reading state art in the Roman empire—representations of captives and conquest in sculpture, painting, and architecture—not merely to comment on the images but to ask: What happens when Roman citizens view this art? As citizenship becomes more and more available to subjects across many categories of difference, does the experience of viewing produce anything like freedom? Or does it rather foster imperial relations?The word for “free” in the passage from Pericles previously quoted is the superlative form of autarkês, meaning self-supporting or independent, as a sovereign. The same roots serve to designate imperial sovereignty (autokratoria) and the emperor (autokratês). It therefore is not surprising and is symptomatic of the state of rhetoric studies at present that the Athenian democracy praised by Pericles is, for the some of the authors in this special issue (e.g., O’Gorman; Allen; Trasciatti), a point of reference, sometimes an inspiration for the historical figures they study, but not a sanctified origin. And it is also fitting that this special issue closes as it opens, with essays that focus on the ways repressive states—the United States during World War I (Trasciatti) and Russia in the contemporary era (Haskins)—limit and punish free expression especially through the control of space and bodies. In each case, the analysis draws out the power of collective action and the rhetorical impact of bodies “prepared for freedom” (Trasciatti).As the ancient funeral oration proceeds, Pericles declares that “in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person” (Thucydides 1954, 2.41). Here it seems (eidê) that each man appears to be self-sufficient with reference to his body (to sôma). The general, like so many leaders since, must obscure the cruel paradox of destroying persons in the service of the freedom of the state. The “seeming” to be free and the reference to the body intrude as an unconscious into Pericles’s glorification of the solider who is “owner of his own person.”Burke’s (1950) sense of the person (in the second epigraph) is like and unlike that presented in the ancient Greek oration. Couching his project within the extreme limits of war, killing, and enslavement to dictatorship, Burke acknowledges the ultimate boundaries of freedom as life or survival—“good to remember, in these days of dictatorship” (50). The self imagined here might be that self-sufficient or sovereign: the solitary and defended self who can arm himself or herself against persuasion as aggression. And yet as Burke begins the section on “traditional principles of rhetoric,” he introduces the notion of persuasion “to attitude,” “attitude being an incipient act, a leaning or inclination” (50), qualities of a different sort of rhetorical actor. Several articles offered here in a similar fashion explore and expand the concept of rhetorical freedom as a practice, an activity, and a capacity of the person. Ned O’Gorman, for example, reads Milton against Hobbes to find in the former the concept of rhetorical freedom as a quality rather than a state. Scott R. Stroud discovers in Kant a rhetoric wherein autonomy is enacted across multiple agents toward an educative end. And Ira J. Allen presents rhetorical personhood as the characteristic of citizens who are capable of crafting collectively new forms of democratic governance.In all the articles we gain a sense of freedom as an incomplete process, a struggle requiring risk and effort but one with rewards worth savoring (as in the third epigraph). Freedom is an enticement: something sweet to taste and something to be shared. In praising Athens, Pericles remarks not only on the polis and its warriors but on daily life: “just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other” (2.37). Here the word for “freedom” is eleutherôs, coming from a verb that means to loose or let go. This freedom is available to all and reminds us of the creativity and open expression that draws rhetorical thinkers of all eras to the ancient polis despite its limits. We might find a modern parallel in Burke’s (1950) ideas about the sublime: “by the paradox of substance, one can imaginatively identify oneself with the mountain’s massive assertiveness while at the same time thinking of one’s own comparative futility. The identification thus gives a sense of freedom, since it transcends our limitations (though the effect is made possible only by our awareness of these limitations)” (325). The courageous activists presented in Mary Anne Trasciatti’s work on antiwar protestors who defied the Espionage Act during World War I and in Ekaterina V. Haskins’s study of Pussy Riot’s daring performances aimed at Putin’s authoritarian regime and the Church patriarchy supporting it give us a sense of the dangerous lengths to which rhetors will go, in the face of limitations and futility, to seek a common freedom.Through this fine work, we readers are offered more than a taste but rather strong draughts of rhetorical scholarship on freedom. I invite you to imbibe, to slake a thirst, but at the same time to whet your appetite for evermore rhetoric and freedom.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2015.1081524

April 2015

  1. “A Tale of Two Václavs”: Rhetorical History and the Concept of “Return” in Post-Communist Czech Leadership
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This article examines the ways by which former Czech president Václav Havel and former Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus approached their rhetorical roles in the postcommunist climate of a splintering Czechoslovakia. The main argument revolves around how Klaus and Havel divergently employed national memory to make historical arguments about the Czech past and how these symbols could be marshaled to navigate the uncertain waters of postsocialism. Ultimately, Klaus employs a rhetorical strategy of “rupture” with the Czech communist past, while Havel attempts a strategy of “repair.” The tensions between such rhetorical strategies evidence the ways in which Czech intellectuals-turned-public officials vied for the position of chief public historian and national storyteller for the Czech nation.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2015.1010869
  2. Who Cares If Rhetoricians Landed on the Moon? Or, a Plea for Reviving the Politics of Historiography
    Abstract

    Most historical research in rhetorical studies is underwritten by an imperative to “broaden” the field’s historical horizons—to seek out overlooked, underrepresented, or excluded subjects. This “broadening imperative” is commonly aligned with revisionary historiography, which became a tool for historians to critique disciplinary values during the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s. However, due to political and intellectual shifts in recent decades, “broadening” has become a preservative act to strengthen the field’s ideological values rather than a critical one to examine them. Ultimately, if historians value the radical perspective of “revisioning,” it is necessary to reinvest in critical historiography.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.1008907
  3. “A Maturity of Thought Very Rare in Young Girls”: Women’s Public Engagement in Nineteenth-Century High School Commencement Essays
    Abstract

    Though largely debarred from public rhetorical performance as adult women, young women in the nineteenth-century US received rhetorical training and performed their original compositions before large public audiences as high school students. Their access to the academic platform stemmed in part from their politically contained position as students and “girls” in this context. But students used these opportunities to intervene in political debates and to comment on their experiences as women and students. These rhetorical interventions represent an important part of our rhetorical history, shedding light on a significant rhetorical opportunity for many young women across the US.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.1008911
  4. Accessing the Harlem Renaissance Through The Crisis
    Abstract

    This article explores The Crisis magazine as a framework for students to gain a better understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the works produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Ortega’s essay details the benefits of archival research for undergraduate students and specific ways in which to use The Crisis as a teaching tool in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Finally, her essay examines the ways in which The Crisis helps facilitate an understanding of canon formation during the Harlem Renaissance.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2845177

February 2015

  1. “Gifts” of the Archives: A Pedagogy for Undergraduate Research
    Abstract

    This essay details the pedagogical possibilities of incorporating archival research assignments in undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses. It uses Susan Wells’s concept of the “gifts” of the archives to explore a pedagogy for undergraduate research that emphasizes uncertainty and exploration—a pedagogy that has applications beyond undergraduate archival research projects.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201526859

January 2015

  1. Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women’s Literacies
    Abstract

    Traces of A Stream: Literacy And Social Change Among African American Women (2000), scholars interested in literacy, identity, and social change have continued to pursue ways to include the voices of women who have previously been underrepresented within scholarly work.Indeed, these recovery projects-often considered part of a revisionist enterprise-represent important examples for those interested in the literary and rhetorical practices of women who have been overlooked based on gendered, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities.Illustrating this, scholars have developed a range of archival, rhetorical, and interview projects that uncover women as historical subjects who represent the myriad ways women develop and use rhetorical skills and literacies.For instance, in Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911, Jessica Enoch describes female teachers who contested the normative educational structures that oppressed marginalized groups and, rather, developed pedagogical strategies that encouraged civic participation.In another recovery project, Beyond the Archives, Gesa Kirsch describes the role of women who participated in a male-dominated sphere as physicians and civic advocates in the 19th century.In the same book, Wendy Sharer illustrates a new understanding of uncovering voices when she finds scrapbook examples of even her own grandmother's engagement with political literacies.These examples represent just some of the important work that has emerged in order to uncover and reframe the literate and rhetorical legacies of women from multiple subject positions.Erica Abrams Locklear's book Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women's Literacies adds a unique contribution to these discussions by focusing on the literacies of women from Appalachia-a region, she argues, too-often characterized by a deficit framework.That is, Locklear challenges the gendered, regional, and classed stereotypes that represent women in Appalachia as "illiterate, " "hillbillies, " "Other, " or

    doi:10.25148/clj.10.1.009281
  2. Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times
    Abstract

    Strong in theory, rich in history, and farreaching in its implications, Producing Good Citizens will soon become a staple for scholars, activists, and pedagogues alike who are interested in the complicated intersections of literacy and citizenship. In this historicized work, Amy Wan explores three main sites of citizenship training during the 1910s and 1920s-federally-sponsored immigrant Americanization programs, unionsupported worker education training, and college-mandated first-year writing courses. Wan's book starts with a brief introduction to citizenship theory, moves into archival research of each training site, and concludes with applications of her methodology to present anxieties over citizenship, particularly in relation to the Patriot and DREAM Acts. Through her book, Wan complicates citizenship as a discursive construct and demonstrates the limits of what literacy-and citizenship-can do for students as well as "the limitations put upon students by not only the idea of citizenship, but also its legal, political, and cultural boundaries" (178). Wan's powerful, timely argument and her final challenge to educators and scholars alike should not be ignored. Together, Wan invites us to consider what is meant by the invocation of citizenship in the classroom, to analyze the habits of citizenship that are encouraged by our practices, and to connect our citizen-making processes to other more politically and materially situated notions of citizenship.

    doi:10.25148/clj.10.1.009282
  3. Recuperating John Bascom’s Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric and Contemporary Rhetorical Education
    Abstract

    Revisionist historiographies in rhetorical studies often recuperate marginalized figures to advance scholarship on rhetorical education. I illustrate the heuristic value of recuperating mainstream figures by drawing on unexamined materials of John Bascom, whose contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory have been determined exclusively by his textbook, Philosophy of Rhetoric. I challenge such interpretations by using autobiography and institutional history to illustrate Bascom’s disdain for rhetoric and preference for philosophy. I synthesize Bascom’s publications, teaching, and administrative work while president of the University of Wisconsin to recuperate a civic philosophy of public education that integrated civic humanism with progressivism to promote collective identity and shared governance. I use Bascom’s philosophy to support rhetorical education that integrates participation and deliberation as strategies for civic engagement. This essay contributes to rhetorical historiography by demonstrating how a wider range of materials can produce more complex, compelling accounts of an individual’s contributions to theory or pedagogy.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.980520

October 2014

  1. Archival Research Processes: A Case for Material Methods
    Abstract

    This article argues for a framework of material methods, a forefronted material-rhetorical approach to archival research, applying material-methodological heuristics of rhetorical accretion and proximity. The article offers an extended example of archival research undertaken at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Such heuristic content generated by a material approach is valuable in two ways. First, it offers readable layers of rhetorical accretion that deserve examination and analysis as separate texts in order to make meaning of research processes. Second, such content makes archival methods more transparent while resisting an untroubled narrative arc of our stories of research.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.946871

September 2014

  1. Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study by Ben McCorkle
    Abstract

    Reviews 417 many ways, but it confirmed for me the distance between Letters to Power and Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals. To be sure, I want all of what McCormick has to offer: I want the letter to help us rethink rhetorical history, and I want the weapons of the weak to supply learned advocacy. I'm unsure, however, that we need to Hold these projects in tandem. Dave Tell The University of Kansas Ben McCorkle, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A CrossHistorical Study. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni­ versity Press, 2012, xiii, 207 pp.: black and white illustration. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8093-3067-6 At a time when media platforms for content delivery proliferate so we can stay abreast of the latest iLife gadgetry; many scholars in both rhetorical studies and new media studies have been tracking the resurgence of interest in "delivery"-both in terms of the technical apparatuses that deliver content and in the rhetorical affordances of such platforms. Rhetoricians as diverse as James Porter and Kathleen Welch tout a new era of delivery, even the ascendancy of delivery as the rhetorical canon needing attention and study in the digital age. Such, at least, is the opening premise of rhet/comp and new media scholar Ben McCorkle's first book, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Dis­ course: A Cross-Historical Study, which takes stock of this "revived" interest in delivery and notes how it has assumed a position as the "central element of the rhetorical process" (xi). But McCorke's interest in delivery is not just to help assert its current eminence; rather, he seeks to examine "the dynamic that has historically existed between rhetorical delivery and...technological shifts in our society" (2). More bluntly, he argues throughout the pages of this ambitious and wide-ranging book that "delivery's status can be read as an indicator of Western culture's attempts to come to terms with newly emerging technics, media forms, and technologies" (2). To demonstrate how delivery has been key to navigating shifts in literacy and the acquisition of new communications tools and platforms, McCorkle takes a broad view, examining over 2500 years of technological innovation in writing and composing across media. We move quickly through the shift from orality to alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece, to the Ramist rhetorics of the latel5th and early 16th centuries and the birth of European printing, to the belletristic and elocutionary movements of the 18th and 19th centuries and the rise in mass printing and literacy, to the advent of mass and digital media in the early and late 20th century respectively. Each historical moment becomes a "case study" of a technological innovation in writing or literacy that McCorkle invites us to re-imagine as an example of how the 418 RHETORICA canon of delivery comes to the fore to help navigate the transition. In the process, McCorke redefines delivery as a "technological discourse" in that "theories of delivery have historically helped to foster the cultural reception of emergent technologies of writing and communication by prescribing rules or by examining and privileging tendencies that cause old and new media forms to resemble one another" (5). Take the emergence of textual literacies in ancient Greece as an exam­ ple. Writing about Plato's dialogues, McCorkle notes how they "are not faithful transcriptions of oral events"; rather, any given dialogue comprises a "conceptual remediation of an oral discursive practice that functions by borrowing the generic conventions of a prior mode of communication, ac­ complishing the dual task of making writing appear more like speech and speech more like writing" (61). While the move to print literacies might have coincided with a declining overt interest in oral delivery, those modes of delivery were nonetheless recaptured in the new technology of writing. In this fashion, McCorkle's analysis avoids technological determinism by emphasizing the interplay of older modes of delivery with newer technolo­ gies. For instance, when analyzing the rise of the elocutionary movement with the spread of mass printing and increasing literacy in the nineteenth century, he describes how oral delivery and printing conventions began to resemble one another: "Yet another mechanism of remediation, the elocu­ tionary movements advocated...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0006
  2. Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals by Samuel McCormick
    Abstract

    414 RHETORICA The focus of "Chapter 5 Giving and Getting Advice by Letter" is the way advice was offered as a gift to the recipient. This act of advice giving, though, was fraught with many perils. White's analysis of these perils shows encyclopedic knowledge of Cicero's social relationships and sensitive close reading. He shows how the advice giver had to balance the risk of bad advice with the opposite risk that bland generalities would be useless, and the hierarchical problem that while detailed and specific advice was the most useful gift, it could also appear condescending. Furthermore, advice given or received could implicate the interlocutors in each others' actions, leading to credit in the case of good results and discredit otherwise. Finally, "Chapter 6: Letter Writing and Leadership," shows the role of letters in the political events of 44 and 43, showing how letters functioned as part of political persuasion, influence peddling, and strategic communica­ tion. White shows how Cicero's letters help us understand his involvement in these events in a more personal and direct manner than the Philippic Orations and provide for us a rare opportunity to understand the positions, motivations, and maneuvers of the Roman political elite in a time of crisis. Overall, Cicero in Letters is an erudite, readable and original work that promises to be a major landmark in its area. Rhetorical scholars, however, will find frustrating a few significant lacunae in White's approach. The first, and most obvious, is that in explaining Ciceronian persuasion, White does not cite Cicero's rhetorical works at all, apparently thinking that Cicero's books on persuasion are of no use at all in helping us understand his per­ suasive practices. A second issue not addressed by White is the pedagogical circulation of letters. Roland Barthes famously said that "literature is what is taught" (1986). As many letter collections circulated in antiquity as peda­ gogical models, and Cicero's orations also functioned as models for students of rhetoric, it is puzzling that White does not address the possibility of peda­ gogical intentions and uses of the letters. Despite lack of direct interaction with rhetorical scholarship and rhetorical approaches to epistolography and epistolary theory, White's Cicero in Letters lays invaluable groundwork for future rhetorical studies of Ciceronian letters. Carol Poster York University Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Pub­ lic Intellectuals. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.197 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-271-05073-7 Samuel McCormick s new volume holds two arguments in equipoise. As its title suggests, the first argument focuses on Letters to Power. It is an investigation of epistolary rhetoric, its form, its audiences, its strategies, and its cunning. Make no mistake, this is not your standard issue ars dictaininis. Reviews 415 Under McCormick s careful hand, the old art of letter writing is invested with a host of pressing lessons: about power, about the professoriate, and about the history of rhetoric. As his subtitle suggests, the second argument is about Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals. Here McCormick's concern is with learned intervention. In an age in which the classic role of the public intellectual is increasingly unavailable, McCormick asks what modes of resistance are available for today's institutionalized academics? The book's conceit, of course, is that these two arguments work in tandem: that the epistolary form provides rhetorical resources for learned advocacy. McCormick's account of epistolary rhetoric is grounded in the letters of Seneca the Younger, Christine de Pizan, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard. He argues that the epistolary form constitutes a "minor rhe­ toric" (13). It is a "minor" rhetoric not because letters are subordinate to treatises, but because the letters harbor the capacity to destabilize the hierar­ chy according to which treatises or tomes are more important than personal letters. Most importantly from my perspective, as a "minor rhetoric" the letter harbors the potential to reshape the history of rhetoric. From the per­ spective of the epistolary form, Seneca, Christine, Kant, and Kierkegaard now fit squarely in rhetorical history. Significantly, their place in such a history requires no recourse to the thematics of their thought; Seneca thematized retirement and Kierkegaard...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0005
  3. Daughters of the Seminaries: Re-landscaping History through the Composition Courses at the Cherokee National Female Seminary
    Abstract

    Challenging histories of male-dominated composition instruction during the nineteenth century, this article recovers composition practices at the Cherokee National Female Seminary, locating the practices at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization. Through Indigenous storytelling and archival research methods, the author asserts that our cultural locations landscape our writing histories.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201426110

August 2014

  1. Immanence, Governmentality, Critique: Toward a Recovery of Totality in Rhetorical Theory
    Abstract

    Abstract Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism provide an implicit critique of the contemporary theoretical emphasis on antirepresentational, immanent theories of discourse, subjectivity, and power. From this standpoint, such immanentism can be understood as a distinct effect of a neoliberal governmental practice directed at the suppression of the idea of totality. To address Foucault's critique, this article argues for a reinterpretation of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of “situation” to recover a working notion of totality that would be useful for critical and material rhetorical inquiry. Historicizing the immanent turn in the critical humanities can open the way for a critical social theory of communication.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.3.0227

June 2014

  1. Alexandre le Grand. Les risques du pouvoir, Textes philosophiques et rhétoriques éd. par Laurent Pernot
    Abstract

    314 RHETORICA cause Reid zzlook[s] askew at existing disciplinary histories" to reassemble the sometimes disparate people, texts, and institutions that comprised Parlia­ ment's rhetorical culture (Hawhee and Olson, "Pan-Historiography, p. 96). He recognizes multiple eighteenth-century disciplines at play in the print circulation of Parliament and enlists several contemporary disciplines to in­ terpret archives that complicate the purview of traditional scholarship about Parliament. In addition to history and rhetorical theory, Reid draws upon his background as a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, discussing, for instance, how Cowper, Samuel Johnson, and William Hazlitt criticized par­ liamentary oratory Complementing Matthew Bevis's study of nineteenthcentury literature and rhetoric, he shows "how the permeable boundaries between speech and print were related to those between politics and liter­ ature" because print media encouraged readers to imaginatively reconstruct parliamentary speech (Bevis, The Art of Eloquence, 2007, p. 23). Like Cow­ per liberating the "imprison'd wranglers," Reid gives voice to the variety of rhetorical activities surrounding the eighteenth-century Commons. With copious archival evidence and thoughtful deployment of recent historio­ graphic approaches, he sheds new light on the rhetorical practices of the eighteenth-century Parliament and its constituents. Katie S. Homar University ofPittsburgh Laurent Pernot (ed., trans., comm.), Alexandre le Grand. Les risques du pouvoir, Textes philosophiques et rhétoriques, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013, XXIII + 242 pp., ISBN: 978-2-251-33967-2. Se fu il grande teatro ateniese del V secolo a. C. a mettere per primo al centro della scena la duplice veste della figura del monarca, sempre in bilico fra regalità e tirannide, fu uno storico del IV secolo, Teopompo, a far risaltare le luci e le ombre che si riverberavano da un personaggio storico, l'ingombrante padre di Alessandro, Filippo II di Macedonia, dando cosí vita a una nuova impostazione storiografica (cfr. L. Canfora, in C. Franco, Vita di Alessandro il Macedone, Palermo 2001, pp. 11-12). Sarebbe stato pero il figlio, il grande conquistatore del mondo, a prestarsi, piú di ogni altro, a un grandioso sviluppo di questa idea della compresenza di bene e male (peraltro connaturata alia visione greca delle cose fin da Hes. Op. 179): e quegli storici che ne raccontarono vita e imprese, e che eccellevano anche come scrittori (si pensi a Curzio Rufo), fecero di lui un ritratto, di perdurante influenza, caratterizzato da potenti chiaroscuri. Alessandro divenne cosí un paradigma del potere, e del suo buono o cattivo uso, soprattutto nei lunghi secoli in cui un potere supremo vi fu, incarnato da un imperatore, di volta in volta migliore o peggiore di chi l'aveva preceduto sul trono. Reviews 315 Nell originale scelta di testi greci e latini, di età impériale, che costituiscono il corpus di questo suggestivo piccolo libro dal titolo molto signifi­ cativo (Les risques du pouvoir), Laurent Pernot (LP) raccoglie e antologizza autori (Seneca padre, Dione di Prusa, Luciano; estratti di «une foule de déclamateurs grecs et latins, célèbres ou anonymes» ) che «se situent sur un double registre, celui de la philosophie et de la rhétorique à la fois» (p. XI-XII), e che hanno scritto di Alessandro Magno senza essere né storici né biografi. Apre il volumetto una breve premessa generale (Avant-propos) sui principi che hanno informato la selezione degli autori e dei testi e sul filo conduttore che idealmente li unisce (pp. IX-XVIII); la corredano alcuni ausili pratici per il lettore (un prospetto cronológico délia storia délia Macedonia fino alla morte di Alessandro e una cartina, ridotta all'essenziale, dell'itinerario délia sua grande spedizione in Asia). A ogni testo antico riportato, in una traduzione realizzata da LP appositamente per questo volume, viene premessa una Introduction, che dà notizie sull'autore e sul testo prescelto. Seguono due appendici su terni alquanto specialistici (pp. 163-170: I. La théorie des trois "dénions"; II. La fin énigmatique du quatrième Discours sur la Royauté) e una abbastanza ricca serie di note di carattere molto vario: sono per lo più informative ed esplicative, ma registrano anche puntualmente citazioni e allusioni presentí nei testi; non mancano, in taluni casi, quelle di carattere più specificamente filológico. Chiudono Popera una...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0032

May 2014

  1. Untimely Historiography? Foucault’s “Greco-Latin Trip”
    Abstract

    Around 1980, Michel Foucault took a new direction in his historical work. This essay poses a question about the historiographical stance Foucault adopts in his late lectures by contrasting them with an early essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The central question concerns the status of “critical history,” a term Foucault derives from Friedrich Nietzsche. The turn toward ethics in the later work combines with Foucault’s urge toward a rapprochement with philosophy as a discipline and his engagement with canonical works of antiquity in a constellation of effects that seem to blunt the critical edge of his earlier historiography. It is finally through a turn toward the Cynics very near the end of his career that Foucault revives a form of historiographical untimeliness.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911559
  2. Writing the Event: The Impossible Possibility for Historiography
    Abstract

    This essay argues that traditional historical methods elide the radical singularity of the event by subjecting the event to meaning by way of categorical norms that cannot—by definition—include the radical singularity of “what happened.” Such historiographical methods render every event significant only insofar as it becomes evidentiary to and subservient to a satisfying narrative with a proper beginning, middle, and end—all of which follow, chronologically, in a linear, logic of time. Relying on Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the event, specifically in “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” this essay will address the impossible possibility of writing the event by way of a hospitable historiography—beyond the representational demand, appropriative impulse, and temporal mandate of traditional historical methods.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911561
  3. Disability Rhetoric, by Jay Dolmage
    Abstract

    In Disability Rhetoric, Jay Dolmage draws together disability studies and rhetorical history and theory to make a compelling case for both the “central role of the body in rhetoric” (3) and disabil...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911573
  4. Haunted by a Peacock: Discovering, Testing, and Generating Rhetoric in Untimely Ways
    Abstract

    In this essay, a peacock represents an “untimely” agent of transformation in an Aristotelian-based rhetoric. The peacock refers to a fragment attributed to Antiphon. This essay identifies and develops two untimely historiographical ways for pursuing an answer to the question, how can sophistical fragments in general and Antiphon’s fragment in particular be employed to generate attractive spaces for the future of rhetoric as an art of civic discourse? The essay is divided into four parts. It begins with a methodological introduction to untimely ways of doing historiography followed by a discussion of the fragment about the peacocks. The third part situates the fragment in a “laboratory” where “equipment” is set up to explore the fragment with untimely ways. The last part of the essay describes how if the peacock’s wing were left alone, rhetoric would be better prepared to look outside of itself into new forms for new functions.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2014.911562

April 2014

  1. Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville: Acknowledging a Rhetoric of Conversation
    Abstract

    This article analyzes the importance of conversation employed by students working with community stakeholders in a civic writing seminar. Acknowledging Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work on the rhetorical situation and Burke’s concept of identification provides a strong background of the students’ understanding of the civic sphere; however, medieval rhetorician Madeleine de Scudéry’s (1683) provocative treatise, “On Conversation,” reminds us to expand the arena of civic discourse. Scholar Jane Donawerth’s recovery of Scudéry’s treatise suggests the power of private discourse as more useful than public rhetoric. This article concludes that theorizing the rhetorical situation alone proves inadequate to energize young rhetors’ discourse needed to engage public civic agencies and actors to action.

    doi:10.59236/rjv13i2pp28-46

2014

  1. Feminist Rhetorical Studies—Past, Present, Future: An Interview with Cheryl Glenn
    Abstract

    In this interview, Jess Enoch talks with Cheryl Glenn about her professional career as a leading scholar in feminist rhetorical studies. Through their exchange, Cheryl discusses the emergence of feminist historiography in our field; she identifies important trends in feminist research, and she pinpoints areas of scholarship that feminist rhetoricians might continue to explore. They conclude the interview with Cheryl underscoring the importance of feminist community building, collaboration, and mentorship.

December 2013

  1. “I’m on a Stage”: Rhetorical History, Performance, and the Development of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum
    Abstract

    This article examines founder Frank L. Gilyard’s role in the establishment of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, through the dual lenses of African American rhetoric and performance studies. It concludes with an analysis of how these insights informed a community-based research course in honors first-year composition.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201324503

November 2013

  1. Guest Editors’ Introduction: Seizing the Methodological Moment: The Digital Humanities and Historiography in Rhetoric and Composition
    Abstract

    Although rhetoric and composition has long engaged with emerging digital technologies, historians in our field have not yet in large part entered these conversations. In this special issue, we present four essays by scholars building digital historiographic projects, each of which directly addresses values and concerns that lie at the heart of critical practice in rhetoric and composition: engaging underrepresented and marginalized communities; taking up critically important questions regarding historiographic investigation; and emphasizing collaboration among both scholars and stakeholder groups. Together, these essays contribute significantly to the still nascent conversation regarding how the digital intersects with the historical.

    doi:10.58680/ce201324268
  2. From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity through Metadata
    Abstract

    This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

    doi:10.58680/ce201324272