Reviewed by: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld William P. Weaver Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 The figures of speech are the subject of a reevaluation in literary scholarship of the Renaissance era. Their importance has never been entirely out of view—they are hard to ignore. Early printed editions of the classics sometimes note figures in the margins, and this was a practice emulated by one “E.K.,” the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender who noted, among other figures, “a pretty epanorthosis” here and “an excellent and lively description” there. Evidently the figures contributed to basic literacy in academic contexts, and it is hard to imagine that all that training was confined to the schools and universities. In recent interpretative scholarship on English poetry, a productive approach has been to place one figure of speech in focus, and compare its uses in order to discover its latent meanings. The effectiveness of this approach is amply illustrated, for example, by essays collected in a 2007 publication entitled The Renaissance Figures of Speech, covering twelve figures.1 Elsewhere, groupings of figures, subject as they were to classifying instincts of humanist writers and teachers, have proven meaningful instruments for literary interpretation. In a 2012 book, Jenny C. Mann considered various unruly figures under the heading of hyperbaton, in order to trace the difficulties of translating classical rhetoric and poetics into English vernacular practices.2 In Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld takes the latter approach, collecting and examining a group of figures under the heading of the “indecorous,” namely figures that flaunt their artistry, transgress modesty, and eschew generally the gold standard of Renaissance wit: sprezzatura, the dissembling or disguising of effort and study. Three figures—simile, antithesis, and periphrasis—were selected and compared to illustrate Rosenfeld’s thesis that ostentatious figures offered a distinctive means of thinking as well as of embellishing. It is a persuasive and coherent selection. Comparing, contrasting, and “talking about” or renaming something—these are logical as well as rhetorical operations. Together, they represent a promising start on Rosenfeld’s ambitious aim: “to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modem poetry” (13). In three chapters of Part One, Rosenfeld describes an intellectual and pedagogical landscape that gave rise to “indecorous thinking,” that is, the practices and patterns of thought afforded by ostentatious figures of speech. It’s a contentious landscape drawn along lines of Ramus’ reforms in rhetoric [End Page 350] and dialectic, as these were filtered into English discourse by means of handbooks of the figures. Rosenfeld relies on the best-known and oft-rehearsed aspect of these reforms, filling out her account with some original scholarship on reading and composition practices. In a nutshell, Ramus’ attempt to simplify rhetoric instruction by reserving inventio and dispositio for dialectic (or logic) instruction resulted in a truncated presentation of rhetoric as consisting of just elocutio and actio, or style and performance. Although it could not have been Ramus’ or his followers’ intent to imply an autonomous field of discourse, some English vernacular handbooks of rhetorical poetics, such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), nonetheless give the impression that rhetoric might be studied independently of logic and reduced to the study of elocutio, which itself might be reduced to the study of schemes and tropes. It is in that imagined domain of an autonomous and mutilated rhetoric that Rosenfeld argues a counter-humanist movement in English poetics of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries. The argument for indecorum (the weaker argument) sometimes feels ponderous in Part One, but the pace picks up in Part Two. In three chapters, Rosenfeld convincingly shows the figures’ vitality and potential to structure and organize fictional thought, narrative, and speech. These are fine examples of rhetorical criticism and English literary scholarship. In Chapter 4, taking as a starting point Spenser’s portrayal of Braggadochio in The Faerie Queene, book 2, Rosenfeld compares some competing qualities of the figure simile and shows that it...

Reviewed by: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al Christoph Pieper Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Studying antiquity means studying fragments, given the highly fragmented nature of our knowledge of its politics, art, and literatvire. Within [End Page 346] this mosaic of bits and pieces, texts that have been transmitted as fragments are a specifically challenging field of research, one that has attracted lots of scholarly attention in recent decades. Fragments of oratory are a specific case within this field: as the editors of the volume stress in their introduction, every speech we read as text is, in a way, already a fragment, as it is the textualized reduction of a complex form of communication that includes words and arguments. Also, the vocal qualities of the speaker, his performance and auctoritas—all these aspects are lost to our immediate perception, even if the full text of a speech is transmitted. And yet, the relevance of fragments for understanding the persuasiveness and impact of oratory in the ancient world is huge. Studying the fragments of Roman Republican oratory therefore means more than simply reading and interpreting the fragments and testimonies in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta; in order to reconstruct their rhetorical potential, one needs a thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness, and a good grasp of the transmitting author’s own agenda. The volume under review, one of the preliminary proceedings that prepare the new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) by Catherine Steel and her Glasgow team, has an outspoken interest in the fragments’ context that goes beyond textual representation: it includes reconstructions of performance and sensory surrounding. It reflects on the relevance of the speaker’s authority and on the changing cultural climate in the second and first centuries bce, when the interaction with Greek culture increased in Rome and when rhetoric challenged the traditional political hierarchy based on auctoritas (Alexandra Eckert). The authors of the volume approach the methodological challenges in an admirably undogmatic way that includes traditional philology, historical studies, and modern theoretical approaches. In this short review, I can merely offer some lines that run through the volume (by no means an exhaustive list). The volume is divided into two parts: transmission and reconstructions; but as happens with good conference volumes, important questions return throughout the book. A first important theme is the transmitting author, whose reasons for quoting or summarizing must be taken into account when studying (not only oratorical) fragments. S. J. Lawrence convincingly argues that Valerius Maximus’ collection of dicta should not be understood as neutral; instead Valerius wants to demonstrate the limits of oratory in Republican times (which influences his choice of exempla). Armando Raschieri, in a rather additive overview, analyses the contexts in which Quintilian quotes Republican orators. Generally, one of the aims of studying fragmentary Republican oratory has always been to get beyond Cicero for our knowledge about what speaking in the Republic meant and looked like. But as Cicero’s canonical status and his canon of orators in the Brutus were so powerful after his death, one has to be aware of the Ciceronian intertext that shapes later ancient readers’ perceptions. Alfredo Casamento tackles the problem of how to deal with Cicero’s legacy in his treatment of [End Page 347] Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta in the Brutus, whereas Ian Goh and Elena Torregaray Pagola look for genres not influenced by Cicero in which relevant information on Republican oratory can be found: Republican satire (Goh with a very dense, associative, and inspiring reading of Lucilius’ book 2), and comedy (Torregaray Pagola with a close reading of a section of Plautus’ Amphitruo). John Dugan contributes a methodologically far-reaching chapter for the case of Macrobius’ quotation of the second-century bce orator Gaius Titius. His working method has the potential to offer unexpected results for other fragments as well: based on New Historicism and Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick descriptions, Dugan concludes that “the only Titius we will read will be that which...

Reviewed by: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods Jordan Loveridge Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 At the small liberal arts school where I teach, all students take a history course in which they read, among other common texts, Virgil’s Aeneid. A popular assignment for many of the professors teaching this course, myself included, is to assign students a speech where they compose in character what Aeneas might have said to Dido upon leaving Carthage, or, alternatively, the words Dido might have said to Aeneas. While each semester some students invariably choose to speak as Aeneas, my observation is that Dido is by far the more popular choice, regardless of students’ gender identity. Upon reading Marjorie Curry Woods’s Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, I am struck by the parallels between my experience and the account of medieval pedagogy that Woods offers. Weeping for Dido explores the role that emotion, particularly women’s emotions, played within the classical texts that constituted the curriculum of the average medieval classroom. Since the medieval classroom was a space dominated by young male students, the focus of Weeping for Dido invites several [End Page 344] interesting questions about gender, identification, rhetorical delivery, and performance, all of which are taken up by Woods at various points within the text. Working with an impressive array of manuscript evidence, Woods demonstrates that “while women were overwhelming absent from [the] schoolboy classical world except in texts, their [women’s] emotions permeated and sometimes dominated the classroom experience” (10). This argument is advanced not through an analysis of the texts in medieval libraries, or through a comparison of rhetorical treatises by known figures associated with medieval education, but rather through close attention to and comparison among manuscript commentaries, glossing, notation, and other codicological elements. The results of this analysis are impressive and provide an illuminating view of medieval pedagogical practices. For instance, in the first chapter, which focuses on manuscripts of the Aencid, Woods shows how familiar elements of rhetorical terminology from sources such as Cicero De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad herennium were used to help young students understand Virgil’s epic poem. One manuscript identifies Dido’s flattery of Aeneas upon his initial arrival in Carthage as a captatio benevolentiae, “the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener” (Woods 17); another identifies Dido’s speech to her sister Anna explaining her feelings for Aeneas as ”Oratio Insinuntiua,” “Insinuative discourse” (Woods 20). These techniques, traceable to traditions such as letter-writing manuals (ars dicta-minis) and Ciceronian commentary respectively, are placed within a classroom context, showing that such theories had pedagogical currency beyond their presumed function. While the Aeneid is central to Weeping for Dido, Woods also engages other “Troy Stories,” notably the Achilleid of Statius, which tells of Achilles’b mother stealing him away and hiding him in women’s clothes to keep him from dying in the Trojan war, and the Ilias latina, a Latin retelling of the Illiad. Both were used in elementary medieval education; “they are on almost every medieval list of what students should read, and they figure prominently in the consensus of what modern medievalists believe medieval students did read” (54). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these elementary texts exhibit completely different habits of glossing than copies of the Aeneid, revealing “what teachers thought would amuse or usefully instruct their pupils” (56). Woods shows that the elements brought to bear on the Achilleid were numerous and varied; many manuscripts, for instance, exhibit speeches that are clearly labeled with the Ciceronian partes orationis (Woods 66); others show how the unique valence of medieval Latin terms sometimes influenced the understanding of literary texts, such as in one manuscript where the Ciceronian Attributes of a Person are used to analyze a scene in which Achilles is disguised in women’s clothing. In this section, the term habitus is understood both in its original sense (as a taught manner of being, a physical disposition), but also as a manner of dress (Woods 67–8). Later...

In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.

This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilia in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.

As new and developing technologies impact public and private life, rhetoricians would be remiss to overlook the deliberative rhetorics that justify their development, implementation, use-value, and impact. Using the 2013 joint congressional hearing “Next Generation Computing and Big Data Analytics” as an example, I argue that justificatory rhetorics <em>about</em> technology intersect with rhetoric <em>from</em> technology, obscuring information vital to critical deliberation. I demonstrate that the expert witnesses at this hearing draw upon rhetoric traditionally associated with American industrialization. Doing so allows them to articulate Big Data as a resource situated upon a metaphorical, American landscape and thus encourages the public to treat it as a natural resource that must be exploited for the betterment of the nation. Ultimately, I argue the use of this rhetoric dissuades critical analysis of the worth of Big Data and investigation of its technical aspects. This raises troubling questions about the ability of rhetoric <em>about</em> technology to both veil and guides what the public accepts as ethical rhetoric <em>from</em> technology.

This essay examines the epideictic rhetoric of Nuri Muhammad, a Nation of Islam student minister, at a Malcolm X Festival in 2018. Nuri’s rhetorical performance demonstrates how he uses the memory of Malcolm X to create a collective epideictic experience with his audience. Using Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” as a foundation, Nuri praises virtues and condemns vices that support the community’s conception and preservation of Malcolm X, positioning the audience as judge rather than spectator. This performance illustrates how everyday cultural practices may deviate from our understanding of rhetoric while augmenting our research practices and goals.

Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse. However, what is missing in these general arguments based on stasis are the particular arguments in science texts aimed at persuasion. Specifically, this article analyzes arguments from the stasis of value in introductions of science research articles. This work is grounded in the Classical topoi, or topics, cataloging types of arguments and identifying seven topoi. I analyzed 60 introductions from articles in three different science journals, totaling the number of value arguments and arguments comprising the topoi. Findings yielded different proportions in types of arguments, sharp disparities among the journals, and widespread use of value arguments. The broader issue at work in this article is how scientists make a case for the importance of their research and how these findings might inform writing and argumentation in the sciences.

Before McLuhan or Ong, “Speech” secured a place in Academe as the offspring of “Poli-Sci.” Accordingly, the discipline traced its roots to democracy’s birth in Athens. With reconsideration of “orality” inspired by developments in communication technology, the discipline reclaimed its place as foremost among the trivium, a restoration foretold by Burke and other New Rhetoric exponents. Publication of the The War of Words and the issue of its relationship to the Rhetoric and the Motivorum tetralogy raise questions concerning Burke’s as well as the discipline’s significance.

In one of his many defenses of rhetoric, Aristotle states that “even if we were to have the most exact knowledge, it would not be very easy for us in speaking to use it to persuade [some audiences] … it is necessary for pisteis and speeches [as a whole] to be formed on the basis of common [beliefs]” (2007, 35). Dana Cloud's Reality Bites advances a similar position, suggesting that the political left needs to reclaim rhetorical appeals as a form of argumentation if it is to defeat the conservative forces that have taken control of the public sphere. Focusing on what she calls the “big five” (narrative, myth, affect, embodiment, spectacle), Cloud argues that the American left is losing political ground to the right due to its inability to craft effective stories convincing the general public that commonly held beliefs support a left political doctrine. Because people are embodied and emotional beings, fact-checking and appeals to pure rationality and logic are ineffective at convincing large swaths of people to change their actions and beliefs. And yet, the left continues to cling to the bare, factual truth, hoping to awaken the masses to their oppression at the hands of a proto-fascist Trumpian regime. As an alternative, Cloud proposes that we embrace what she calls rhetorical realism, a communication strategy built on the notion that “communicators can bring knowledge from particular perspectives and experiences into the domain of common sense, and that we can evaluate truth claims in public culture on the basis of whether they exhibit fidelity to the experience and interests of the people they claim to describe and represent” (15). Rhetorical realism walks the line between relativism and realism, suggesting that “there is a reality—but none of us can know it except through frames of mediation” (2). Truths may objectively exist, but they can be accessed only through rhetorical interventions that structure meaning making.Rhetorical realism has three interrelated tenets. First, rather than appeals to objective or universal truths, rhetorical realism relies upon experiential knowledge and rhetorical appeals. Two of Cloud's case studies—Neil deGrasse Tyson's 2014 reboot of Cosmos and #BlackLivesMatter—reflect this approach. Second, rhetorical realism traffics in doxastic, or common knowledge, rather than epistemic, or formal truths. Because knowledge is accessible only through mediation, rhetorical realism suggests that doxastic questions represent the most worthwhile explorations. Third, grounded in standpoint epistemology, rhetorical realism believes truth claims should be cognizant of power relations and align with the interests of the oppressed and exploited, as those at the lower rungs of society have a clearer, more holistic understanding of how society operates.These three tenets point toward what is arguably rhetorical realism's most radical implication: scholars ought to stop entirely asking formal questions of ontology and epistemology. Drawing from the lessons of rhetoric of science scholarship, Cloud's position is not that “there are no facts outside of rhetoric's intervention,” but rather that “the implementation of their use varies in ways that are strategic and invested with power” (25). Questions about the fundamental nature of our being or what truth is ought to be sidestepped in favor of “adopting the strategy of crafting frames of moral commitment and belief that can carry our truths out of the glades and into glorious, plain view” (4). Cloud does not negate the existence of an ahistorical metaphysics, but instead argues that the search for it is simply not worth pursuing. As she says, “Even if there were ever an original ‘state of nature’ in which humans encountered the world afresh, from that day forward, human symbolic framing and interpretation would have been ever present” (6). Humans instead engage in “dialectically evolving systems of ideas” that reflect localized, perspectival realities and the lived experiences of individuals and groups of people (7). Cloud says that only a realist perspective can explain both how the masses are convinced to embrace problematic ideologies and how to convince them to think otherwise: “The most powerful political discourses emerge when epistemic knowledge is mediated by explanatory and justificatory political frames” (7). By rejecting the formal, philosophical search for truth and knowledge, rhetorical realism is grounded in a social and political reality aligning with the lived experiences of various groups.A question arises from rhetorical realism's rejection of epistemological and ontological investigations: how does it not devolve into moral relativism, a position that Cloud very clearly lays out as ethically irresponsible (15–16)? Cloud addresses this concern by arguing that scholars should embrace a doxastic version of ethics grounded in the lived realities of the oppressed, defending “a perspective from which to perform criticism in the service of demystifying power and enabling the formation of public consciousness faithful to the insurgent knowledges of the oppressed and exploited” (5). Rhetorical realism thus develops ethics by locating doxastic truths from the position of the most subjugated. From this subjugated ethics, normative statements about the world can be made. For example, “Why critique rape culture unless we can say surely that women are oppressed, that consent should be a precondition for sexual engagement, or that violence against women is wrong?” (5). This normative statement about sexism and rape culture arises from the doxastic truth that women are subjugated in modern society. Rather than devolve into moral relativism, rhetorical realism's adherence to standpoint epistemology provides a valuable tool for ethically interacting with the world.Cloud develops rhetorical realism throughout six chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The introduction to Reality Bites lays out the purpose of the text: to “chart a middle way” between the rationalist and relativist practices through a defense of rhetorical realism (2). Chapter 1 introduces rhetorical realism, arguing that it is irresponsible to “concede ground to post-truth forces” via a “hunker[ing] down in the trenches of massive numbers of facts” or “giv[ing] up entirely and embrac[ing] relativism” (14). In this chapter, Cloud turns toward Marxism as a foundational tool for her theory. In particular, she utilizes Gramscian hegemony to explain how people consent to interests that negatively affect their lives yet can overcome their own oppression through learning and collective struggle, and Marxist feminist Nancy Hartsock for an understanding of standpoint epistemology. If, as Cloud suggests, it is true that class and labor mediate the realities of workers in a capitalist economy, then the critic's role is to “engage subjective experience” as a way of both raising class consciousness and regaining control of dominant societal narratives (31). Rhetorical realism, then, aligns with this Marxist tradition and call to critique.Chapter 2 unpacks the “big five”—narrative, myth, affect, embodiment, and spectacle. Once again, Cloud rejects “objective” positions taken by various leftist theorists, arguing that control over the cultural imaginary is integral to the success of these positions. Each of the “big five” can be useful tools for the left's reclamation of the cultural imaginary. Spectacles, for instance, are “powerful and interested,” motivating individuals to believe, act, and change in productive ways (47). Thus, “we need affect, embodiment, myth, narrative, and … spectacular struggle” (51).Chapter 3 introduces the concept of frame-checking, a substitute for fact-checking. Cloud describes frame-checking as an “alternative method of capturing how contending truth claims may be taken on at various staseis from conjecture through policy, with especial emphasis on quality or value” (73). Facts alone, Cloud argues, have failed us, as they ignore how “economic hardship and anxiety generate popular desire for narratives explaining social crisis at the levels of values and action, refusing to generate compelling narratives in response” (55). In an era of “post-truth,” fact-checking is ineffective at telling people what is real; rather, as Cloud tells us, a particular focus on the fidelity of stories as well as power relations is important for conveying information to the general population. Scholars should attend to the ways that “discourses selectively direct attention, involve audiences intimately with the matter at hand, and construct coherent and noncontradictory schemes of making sense of the world” (62). We should not be aiming to check facts and inquire about truths. Instead, we should attend to the frames that mediate reality.To prove the value of her theory, Cloud details several case studies. In the same chapter in which she introduces frame-checking, Cloud analyzes the controversy surrounding the 2015 Human Capital video series released by the Center for Medical Progress that purported to prove Planned Parenthood harvested aborted fetal tissue for profit. Even though these videos were ultimately discredited as false by fact-checkers, “the footage is compelling in a way that exceeds the capacity of fact-checking to disarm it” (53). Rather than simply fact-checking the video, then, Cloud suggests that it would have been more productive to address the frames by which the videos persuaded audiences that Planned Parenthood is evil. “Imagine pro-choice organizations responding immediately with another video, set in a provocative scandal frame that exposes Daleiden and his outfit, but also … counters the antiabortion videos … by interviewing women who have undergone the procedure and their reasons for doing so” (71). Rather than just denying the videos as false, Cloud suggests that a more apt response would have developed pathetic appeals in order to equal the proverbial playing field.Chapter 4 discusses the frames surrounding Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning's government leaks. Cloud indicates that discourse surrounding these two figures framed Snowden as an all-American hero, drawing upon “the mythic narrative of the masculine agent” (76). In contrast, discourse about Manning revolved around her queerness and transgender identity, which were consistently used to discredit her as mentally unstable and untrustworthy. From this comparison, Cloud concludes that queerness “reveals the limits of mediation in a homophobic and transphobic society” (103) because the media could not deal with the complexity of Manning's character. By all “objective” fact-checking standards, Snowden and Manning—as whistleblowers merely leaking documents—should have been treated equally by the media. However, Manning's queerness meant that she was discredited as a villain rather than lauded as a hero. Cloud does not draw conclusions about the purpose, meaning, or value of queerness from this example, but rather suggests that it further reveals the limitations of supposedly objective truth-based discourses in the public sphere.Chapter 5 provides an example of leftist discourse that draws from the “big five” to inform the public. Cosmos, the 1980 television show incarnated by Carl Sagan and revived in 2014 by Neil deGrasse Tyson, draws from all five of the major strategies Cloud thinks the left ought to adopt. Simultaneously however, Cloud suggests that the show functionally winks at its audience, reminding them that it is a rhetorical construction. For example, the show reminds viewers that we have yet to unlock the secrets of the universe, yet positions Tyson as an almost Godlike figure who reveals those secrets to an audience hungry for truth. Thus, Cosmos can tell its viewers that no one knows what happens in a black hole, while Tyson simultaneously flies into one in his spaceship. Cloud embraces this contradiction, arguing that it is exactly how the left can ethically engage in rhetorical realism—by reminding the public that we too are constructing stories for them to believe. By reminding members of the public that we—and ultimately, everybody—are framing the facts that they are told, people can begin to better recognize the rhetorically mediated nature of all discourse, including scientific discourse.Finally, chapter 6 compares Thomas Paine's Common Sense to the Black Lives Matter social movement, suggesting that both represent “timed, crafted, strategic set[s] of actions” (155). Cloud reads Common Sense in a unique light, arguing that Paine's pamphlet both “established what it means to critique dominant ideology” by denouncing England and demonstrates standpoint epistemology in its demand for the oppressed to resist those in power (141). Cloud also draws from Paine to argue that “the push for truly radical change happens from below” (162) where public intellectuals coalesce with revolutionary activists to fight for freedom and justice. Black Lives Matter also employs the big five by relying upon “public intellectuals who have created and sustained new publics through the use of emerging media and who understand and communicate about injustice in new, compelling, and condensed language” (149). Cloud thus thinks that theorists and activists alike can and should learn from these two very different, yet similar, American moments.Further research could more thoroughly investigate two positions that Cloud advances. First, Cloud alludes to the importance of kairos in a few different places but does not greatly detail its applicability for rhetorical realism. This is particularly stark in terms of the chapter on Black Lives Matter and Thomas Paine, where the author indicates that attending to kairos “will do far better service to social change” than relying upon preconceived beliefs about an audience (148). Kairos is clearly important for Cloud; however, its relationship to rhetorical realism deserves more attention. Given that summer 2020 marks massive, global demonstrations against police brutality in the name of Black Lives Matter, further consideration of the kairotic nature of this and other protest groups could be an incredibly fruitful area for future research.Second, in the conclusion, Cloud suggests that each of her case studies points toward the overarching power of calls for the natural within public discourse. In other words, appeals toward what is “natural” is consistently persuasive for public audiences because the natural is doxastically understood as true. This idea is interesting and could tie into a deeper understanding of Cloud's repeated suggestion that rhetorical realism is necessary for persuading “ordinary” people. Do we need to rely on what is “natural” to persuade “ordinary” people? Can rhetorical realism help scholars redefine what is “natural” or “ordinary”? I hope that future scholarship takes up these questions and provides more insight and direction.Overall, Cloud delivers a well-written, well-defended, and easy-to-read call to remember the “big five,” adopt a rhetorical realist perspective, and engage in frame-checking rather than fact-checking. Any theorist or activist interested in public argumentation and social movements would be helped by reading this book. Additionally, the provocative suggestion that scholars give up epistemological and ontological investigations and instead take up the question of ethics within a rhetorical realist perspective is an important discussion that people should take seriously, particularly as philosophers and rhetoricians debate these questions in the future.

In Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, Casey Boyle—or rather, the habitual practice referred to as Casey Boyle—participates in rhetorical studies' recurring concern with relations between humanism and posthumanism. Boyle's posthumanist project crafts another space within the field to think about what rhetoric is, what it does, and what it may become. Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice recalls the purpose of rhetorical education in the Isocrates and Quintilian traditions—“to become a certain kind of person” (Fleming 1998, 179), but with a posthuman return: Whereas classical rhetorical education aimed at ethically stable character formation—the humanist subject—Boyle's posthuman practice enacts character as in-formation, a process of individuation whereby individual bodies achieve stability, but only for so long—a metastability, which is not an essence, but a series of sense-abilities. Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice expands the many ways (euporia) of doing rhetoric, including the many ways things become different without becoming something separate as well as the many ways of being human without becoming something other than human.The book is organized into three parts: “Preface to Practice,” “Theorizing Rhetorical Practice,” and “Practicing Rhetorical Theory.” In part 1's “Questions Concerning the Practice of Rhetoric,” Boyle introduces readers to the work of Gilbert Simondon. Specifically, Boyle brings Simondon's philosophy of information and media-techno-aesthetics into rhetorical studies and demonstrates how his philosophical concepts, such as individuation, transindividuation, transduction, and metastability, may be incorporated into the body of rhetoric. For example, Boyle argues that information—as material processes—informs bodies so that bodies are always already in-formation, or rather, resolving and dissolving individuations. This incorporation activates new rhetorical capacities by which rhetorical exercises, such as the enthymeme, dissoi logoi, topoi, and copia, may be practiced differently, which, in turn, activates new rhetorical bodies, which, in turn, may exercise and be exercised differently.Part 2 begins with “Rhetorical Ecologies of Posthuman Practice.” Three seemingly disparate analogies open up the practice of practice: learning to use the telegraph, the literary style of Deleuze and Guattari, and the development of technical objects. What each practice shares is its self-erasure. Practice for Boyle is not self-preservation or self-improvement because the repetition of practice enacts changing conditions of its existence. Repetition with difference is what Boyle means by posthuman practice: “ongoing, serial encounters within ecologies” (34). Boyle compares practice to Karen Barad's quantum diffraction, accenting the continual entanglement of matter. Posthuman practice does not reflect the same thing over and over again. Instead, it diffracts, creating “new versions of what might otherwise be seen as the same” (34). For example, reflecting on how one wrote an essay does not reflect the writing of that essay; rather, the reflection essay diffracts the writing of that essay. The writer does not reflect; reflection in-forms the writer. According to Boyle, the reflection on writing does not grant privileged access to interiority, decision making, and rationality. Instead, it is another exercise that may be no more or less insightful than any other exercise. Reflective practices, however, have been a dominant pedagogical tool in the field of composition studies. Thus, the chapter offers a concise history of how this reflective practice emerged in skill development literature on metacognition, demonstrating the shortcomings of this humanist orientation. It then surveys posthuman theories both broadly and within the field of rhetoric to emphasize practice as something other than conscious, intentional activity—what he calls serial: “A series is composed of items that are continuous with but also distinct from one another without being separate” (53). Throughout, Boyle amplifies this point: all practices, including writing and reflection in-formation, create novel possibilities in bodies and environments, and for him, this is a posthuman ethic.Chapter 2, “Posthuman Practice and/as Information,” refines the seriality of posthuman practice as a process of information. Boyle incorporates Simondon's “transductive version of information” to show how information is converted across multiple media in a process that in-forms bodies rather than transmitted between preexisting individual subjects (63). Put differently, information is a dynamic structuring process in which bodies “take form” and by which bodies only ever achieve “metastability” (78). Thus, rhetoric as a posthuman practice undertakes “how to initiate structuring movements across the material and semiotic, digital and analog, theoretical and practical, human and nonhuman” (81) as well as “mind and body, rational and sensuous” (88). In this account, rhetoric is an ethic of becoming a particular kind of body in relation, which Boyle illustrates by reorienting the enthymeme. Rather than defining an enthymeme by what it lacks in comparison to the syllogism, the “missing premise,” he argues, circulates among a collective body within an ecology of practice—an ethic of commonplaces. An enthymeme is a structuring process that “activates the already present connective tissues of a community in ways that the purely rational premises of the syllogism does not/cannot” (84). In this way, the enthymeme exercises the euporia (multiple ways) of rhetoric in which the potential for further invention resides.In part 3, “Practicing Rhetorical Theory,” Boyle develops rhetoric and/as posthuman practice through diffractive elaborations of identity, place, and amplification. In chapter 3, “Informing Metastable Orientations,” Boyle reincorporates the rhetorical practice of dissoi logoi and Richard Lanham's “bi-stable oscillation.” Rather than understanding dissoi logoi as limited to “two-fold arguments” and bi-stable oscillation as limited to two subject positions of a singular identity, Boyle argues for a “metastable orientation” that understands identity as the production of “differing stabilities” (23). In this reorientation, dissoi logoi is a way in which individuals become rhetorical to generate a manifold of arguments, not simply two-fold arguments. Similarly, Lanham's bi-stable oscillation expands to metastable orientations that multiply the many subject positions and sense-abilities of bodies. Together, dissoi logoi and metastable orientations exercise bodies as temporary resolutions of disparate tensions. Rather than a Burkean persuasion attempting to achieve identification, a posthuman rhetorical practice follows the transduction of information “to increase, intensify, and inform what [bodies] can do” (121).Where chapter 3 is concerned with the metastability of identity, chapter 4, “Orienting to Topological Engagement,” hunts for the metastability of places. Rather than static places holding preconceived arguments based on fixed repetition, topoi, in Boyle's telling, are “rhythm machines” (126) producing “transversal mediations” (127) and “unique sensibilities” (23). He performs a “strange archaeology” (130) of topoi, digging into the rhetorical history of topoi to argue that a “topos is always a practice of becoming informed and further informing a place” (146). To demonstrate this sense of topos, Boyle uses topology, which is the mathematical study of “how an object remembers its place while undergoing change” (142). Topoi, experienced topologically, are “immanent mediations between an exterior and interior”—foldings and stretchings of place to produce new rhythms (144). Boyle offers the practice of urban exploration to illustrate topoi as topological, noting how the urban explorer appears as both theorist and practitioner, inside and outside the city. Urban explorers enact and are enacted by places as “varying rhythms of difference and repetition” (155). Put differently, topos is both centripetal—a place that gathers—and centrifugal—a place that disperses, or “runs in all directions” (155).The topological tension between gathering and dispersal is complicated further in chapter 5, “Engaging Nomadic Activity,” in which Boyle asks how we might respond to the seemingly always-on, always-there demands of infrastructural connectivity. As with topoi, we are never simply inside or outside; we are never simply online or offline. Rather, we are always mediated by infrastructural networks; we are bodies in-formation as transindividuals. Bringing together Cynthia Haynes's and Vilém Flusser's versions of homelessness, Rosi Braidotti's nomadism, and Adrian McKenzie's wirelessness, Boyle suggests that a feeling of rootlessness, induced by the connectivity of infrastructural networks, is a “pervasive condition of contemporary life” (169). Nevertheless, he advances the possibility of finding rootedness amid rootlessness by amplifying copia as a posthuman practice: both as “an affirmative practice that exercises one's capacity to resolve a singular problem in multiple ways” and as “an ongoing transindividual practice” that exercises one's capacity to resolve the singular problem of contemporary life—a feeling of homelessness—in multiple ways (24). Copia as transindividual practice cultivates capacities for variability: the transindividual is able to work with apparent scarcity to generate abundance, to multiply connections “while also retaining some sense of prior relations” (184), thus generating euporia by proposing this one and this one and this one—each a possible path to follow.The coda, titled “Activating Sense and Sense-abilities,” picks up the question of “this one” by asking “which one?” Boyle argues that rhetoric as a posthuman practice is informed by an ethic of “which one?” rather than “what is?” Whereas the latter grasps after essence, the former proposes possibilities: the transductive euporia of enthymemes, the manifoldness of metastabilities, the rhythmic repetition and difference of topoi, and the itinerant rootedness of transindividuality. Rather than conscious and reflective disputation, rhetoric and/as posthuman practice in-forms bodily dispositions.Throughout, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice continuously exercises rhetoric's body, showing how it may become different while remaining familiar—and how rhetorical scholars might bring a posthumanist sensibility to rhetoric's traditional emphasis on the humanist subject as the body of rhetoric. With his posthuman reorientation, Boyle demonstrates that there is no unmediated exercise of, or access to, our mediated bodies—nor to the body of rhetoric. Importantly, Boyle practices his posthuman sensibility by writing in a style that enacts his argument: layering in examples, making analogical movements, and repeating with variation what he has already written. The reader begins to sense what he is arguing. The style, as posthuman practice, exercises the reader's capacities for following a line of argument among serial encounters.Some argumentative movements, however, may be too linear. For example, Boyle's history of the emergence of reflection within composition studies is written as a reflection of the field, in a linear structure. No winks. No recursion. He moves easily from traditional rhetoric to current-traditional rhetoric to current-critical rhetoric, “outlining the humanist frame … sketching the discipline's turn to reflective practice” (34). However, in presenting the history as a reflection of the discipline's past, Boyle is able to capture more rhetorical force for his argument, that “the practice of practicing reflection creates and sustains an untenable humanist orientation” (48). The reader must then build a relationship between what appears to be a reflective history and Boyle's point about seriality: serial practice “is a part of, but also apart from, any definite linear logic” (53). A similar issue of perspective may arise when considering the different histories of scholars in composition studies and those in communication studies.Boyle's history of “current-critical rhetoric” in composition studies may give pause to communication scholars because it presents a different disciplinary understanding of “critical rhetoric” and the practice of reflection. Critical rhetoric of communication studies in the 1980s and 1990s offered formative expressions of a posthumanist orientation to rhetoric, including post-Marxist-materialist and historical-archival approaches. Critical rhetoric folded into, with, and away from posthumanist orientations of scholarship that decentered human consciousness and amplified complexity in dynamic ways.Although Boyle's discussion of current-critical rhetoric in composition studies does not discuss critical theory, comparing a critical theory understanding of practice alongside his posthuman conception could offer interesting discussions for a graduate course. Raymie McKerrow's critical practice, for example, could spark interesting conversations regarding what each concept of practice affords rhetorical scholars and to what extent a critical posthuman notion of practice, from the critical theory tradition, could be developed (1989). Indeed, a critical practice—praxis and politics—may be required to ensure that rhetoric scholars have skin in the game. For example, Boyle includes the practice of urban exploration without exploring the privileges of urban explorers' bodies, who “discover” the “hidden” and “ruined” infrastructures of cities and who often “conquer” these places through a photographic style that evokes the humanist subject. Similarly, the explication of homelessness as the condition of contemporary life feels unsatisfying when juxtaposed with the exposures of bodies experiencing homelessness in the streets. What ought we do about the actually existing homelessness that prompts the copious transindividuality of chapter 5? If we are to ask “which one?,” we ought to ask “which bodies” are made to endure and which are allowed to perish, again and again. This observation is less a criticism and more a prompt for further reflection, or rather asking again what rhetoric scholars can do.That said, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice is not a work of critical theory or critical rhetoric or a critique of the posthuman condition. Instead, it is an affirmative project, following the philosophical style of Simondon, and, as such, it is interested in challenging us to transform what a rhetorical education can and should do, including the many ways bodies may live together by transforming relationships to build a more generous world.

Alva Noë, who is a major figure in establishment philosophy, has been producing work that speaks directly to rhetoric in new ways that are important. This “In Focus” project explores how so, with the help of Carrie Noland on dance, Thomas Rickert on music, and, in a previous issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric 53.1, Nancy Struever on the basics of human inquiry including pictorial, which she thinks almost nobody gets right except for R. G. Collingwood, and perhaps now Noë. In each case you will see how “rhetoric” must be stretched by way of these lateral artistic, and at the same time essential, projects in the discipline per se.“Rhetoric” in these considerations is certainly not a vague notion that the things we do have persuasive goals, or audiences, for example. Though complicated in this discussion with Noë, “rhetoric” has precise meaning it's the job of this introduction to clarify, because it goes to our basic situation and it does so in a way that's unfamiliar.In Varieties of Presence (2012),1 Noë makes the argument for a rhetoric of experience explicit. Starting with the example of traditional art like song or a painting, Noë explains how mere perceptual exposure is not yet aesthetic experience. Only “through looking, handling, describing, conversing, noticing, comparing, keeping track, [do] we achieve contact with the work/world” (125). But this kind of contact with the world is not neutral; following Kant it falls in the domain of “ought”: our response reflects our sense of how one ought to respond to a work of art for instance. Hence rhetoric as persuasion: “aesthetic experience happens only where there is the possibility of substantive disagreement, and so also the need for justification, explanation and persuasion” (126). Is such persuasive rhetoric relevant only to traditional art forms per se? No—and this is Noë's bold move: he is really working on perceptual experience “tout court,” with art recapitulating the basic fact about perceptual consciousness and serving as a model or “guide to our basic situation.” “Perception is not a matter of sensation; it is never a matter of mere feeling,” Noë summarizes. Instead perceiving is “an activity of securing access to the world by cultivating the right critical stance,” or even more directly: human experience has a “rhetorical structure” (128). How do we miss this according to Noë? “The big mistake,” explains Noë, “is the overlooking of the aesthetic, or critical, character and context of all experience. There is no such thing as how things look independently of this larger context of thought, feeling and interest [classical rhetoric would similarly list the goals of rhetoric: docere, movere, delectare]. This is plain and obvious when we think of the experience of art. It is no less true in daily life” (129).Though resonant with the work of Struever and then with her major reference point Collingwood, or with John Dewey as Noë points out himself, this is a major reorientation of philosophy and rhetoric. It puts philosophy right next to other human activities that include the arts like dance, music, and painting. And it does so not as the addendum after basic human activities have wound down. On this mistaken model, philosophy and the arts including linguistic arrive only belatedly, after the real work is finished on the ground. Instead, according to Noë, these artistic and thoughtful activities are exactly what make us human in the first place, as they are the inherent possibilities that shape human activity from the outset: no language without the probing possibilities, like irony, that bind up language in a world flexibly, no music without the capacity for musical reflection that offers up the audible world one way not another, no dancing or for that matter movement without the possibility of the arts that put on display dancing and movement, indeed giving us the very world where things including us get moved around. Movement at its most immediate, to pick up this last example, is always already choreographed though not mechanically so—as Noë explains in his reply it is precisely the choreography that at the same time “sets us free,” opening up the distance whether more habitual or more explicitly mindful that makes the activity human in the first place. Rhetoric, then, names the inflection points—of movement, of language, of philosophy and the arts—that make the human situation what it is, with the scholarly activity we call “rhetoric” offering a kind of field guide to the environments in which we are.But, finally, are these environments just ours? They can't be. They are shared fundamentally, though not in ways that Noë explores in this project, despite the fact that he is trained, we should recall, as a philosopher of biology.Gesturing thus to an opportunity beyond this project, I conclude with biologist Joan Roughgarden, who helps us see how environments are shared across species, even down to the rhetorical structures that give particular environments their shape. Instead of selecting sexually for ideal types, argues Roughgarden in her groundbreaking work Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, a species needs “a balanced portfolio” of genes to survive over the long term (2004, 5), and sex, which entails a very wide (but not indefinite; 177) range of behaviors—reproductive and otherwise—is the social activity that continually rebalances a species' overall genetic portfolio in the context of dynamic environments. Instead of offering only background noise, indeterminacy of the sign (as we might call it from the semiotic or rhetorical perspective, where X is somewhere between attractive or repellent, pro- or antisocial, praise or blameworthy, and so on) is compatible with biodiversity precisely insofar as it constitutes the social. Antisocial eugenics and cloning are Roughgarden's counterexamples; just like the computer scientist knows that focusing only on the code while ignoring the execution environment is a mistake, cloning biologists who focus on the nucleus of the cell while ignoring the cytoplasm make the same mistake insofar as they have ceased to work ecologically (311).Then back to Noë at last, it is worth thinking at some point about the ways in which his activities that “put on display” are a subset of a more general biological capacity to triangulate, in environments that are always dynamic and often threateningly so. Now with the help of Struever, Noland, Rickert, and Noë, we can at least start thinking differently about the rhetorical opportunities our current environment offers.

In The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory, Ira Allen does much more than give us a theory of rhetoric. He gives us a map of reality, of how we make the world real to ourselves, how we convince one another (and ourselves) of its realness, even as what we so deem is constantly changing. This book is a primer on how the fact of radical contingency is not in and of itself fatal to the project of human life and politics. On the contrary, for Allen, it is the source of human life and politics. In his careful and elegant way of thinking Allen shows us how out of the chaos and swirl of all that is, we manage nonetheless to continuously produce a tension (what he calls a “hung dialectic”) between what we claim the world to be and what we experience it as being. At the center of this navigation is our relationship to rhetoric itself. For Allen, rhetoric is no less aleatory and contingent than the world we try to describe through its tropes. But rather than being a drawback, this shared contingency is precisely how rhetoric is able to connect us with this world in ways that are both creative and powerful.Allen's book is divided into seven chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the nature of what constitutes “truth” in rhetorical theory. Allen shows us that something deemed true can also (must also) be both fantastical and poetic. Yet, as Allen shows, this is nonetheless a “pragmatic fantasy” (13), that is, it does something; it coheres and performs. Chapters 3 through 5 develop the idea of a “troubled freedom,” a way of negotiating the rules (and there are rules!) to rhetoric without being overly limited by them. These central chapters explore the relationship between modern and classical rhetoric, the way that rhetoric circulates among what Allen calls “focalizers” (the one, the some, the many, the all), and the relationship rhetoric has to the symbols that it employs. These various discussions contend with what could be called the granularity and sedimentation of rhetoric, the traditions and modes by which it is undertaken and how these both shape and free up the power of rhetorical theory to explain the world. Finally, in chapter 6, Allen looks at rhetorical theory in terms of what he calls a “self-consciously ethical fantasy,” bringing this consideration into direct conversation with ethical understandings of how rhetoric functions.In his examination of the possibilities and limits of rhetorical theory, Allen not only describes but models the key notion of his book, which is that of “troubled freedom.” Troubled freedom, as previously noted, references the way we seek expression and persuasion even as we navigate the problematical limits of language. We are never as free as we want to be, but we are also never as constrained as we fear (here again, the tension between those two states is the basis for what we actually can do). Allen accepts the things that he can't prove or know, and from this limited basis, he shows how much freedom we do have, as well as the kinds of truths and fantasies—which in Allen's fascinating formulation are effectively the same thing—we can come up with out of this basis.In order to give a sense of the depth and breadth of this book it is helpful to further explain a few of its central notions. One key claim is the aforementioned concept of a “hung dialectic.” This notion is central to the entire scope of this work. A hung dialectic is one that does not resolve itself, does not lead to transcendence in any sense and is, perhaps above all, not a teleological certainty. For all of this, the hung dialectic still is highly effective. Allen tells us that rhetorical theory is itself a hung dialectic, writing, “As a hung dialectic, rhetorical theory does not issue in any one outcome. It remains multiple and in its multiplicity inaccessible [as a clear and determinable thing]…. No one aspect of rhetorical theory's work can be pressed into service as its truth” (71). This is, once again, not disabling but actually enabling because it allows multiplicity to be expressed, to contend with itself, to radically change and develop whatever rhetorical theory is even as it remains bound within its limits (including its limit to not be a single, coherent, and unchanging thing). A hung dialectic, you could say, is the basis for troubled freedom; it is a key part of how we navigate an imperfect and ever changing world.A second—and related—critical concept for this book is spirit. Allen tells us that spirit is the thread that ropes together the disparate aspects of rhetorical theory, its referents, its devices, its patterns and usages. But he is careful not to say that spirit is a teleology that contains within itself all that it needs to know before it even starts. This latter idea is redolent of a reading of Hegel that Allen vigorously challenges. Spirit is for Allen more of a moving target. When we read Hegel's work without a sense of spirit as a form (or really the form) of motion, we make mistakenly limiting snapshots of his work. Allen tells us that “[spirit] is anticipatorily apprehended as synchronic totality only in its diachronic passage through and by means of opposition that function as reality-makers and that never are wholly resolved” (99–100). In other words, spirit works not despite but because it does not conform to ordinary rules about temporality (and spatiality for that matter too). It is the throughline of rhetorical shapedness, but that shape can be seen only in retrospect.To call spirit “anticipatory,” as he does, does not mean that for Allen spirit already knows that which it is anticipating. It is a process of becoming, yes, but each stage of that becoming is not known in advance (even though it is anticipated). To think of spirit as a form of motion allows rhetorical theory, in Allen's conception, to make sense to us, to be like a particle wave whose shape over time constitutes a kind of cohering that allows for “reality mak[ing].” This insight allows Allen to graphically depict rhetorical theory as a whole. He charts for example a movement from classical to modern modalities. Just like quantum physics, these separated aspects are both particles and waves. It is spirit that unites them even while they keep their separate singularity. As Allen tells us, “Spirit is both a style of motion and the fullness of being that occurs via that motion” (105).I think that this concept of spirit is, like the hung dialectic, a very useful way to think about the coherence of disparate things, the way that they can be effective even though they are multiple and sometimes at odds with one another. I often think of the human subject, not as a singular organized and hierarchical whole but rather as a vast anarchist ferment of various competing, overlapping subjectivities, some of which are wholly interior and some of which are shared or borrowed from other selves. But this doesn't mean that we are paralyzed by dissension or multiplicity. We do things: we talk, we think, we act. You could say that the thing that holds us together is this spirit. But what exactly is spirit in that case? As Allen describes it, it is not in any way a theological concept. Perhaps it merely refers to the possibility of language and thinking producing an effectively unified set of concepts despite the apparent disorganization that comes with giving up on the kinds of certainties that Allen is battling against (certainties of sense, predetermined meanings, “truth” in language, etc.). Spirit, you could say, works along the lines of “if you build it they will come”: the mere possibility (or spirit) of coherence amidst contingency makes it so.To those who worry about such a view of language leading us into a zone of total chaos and confusion, Allen explains that human beings cannot not see the world as predicated, as having meaning and truth in it. I suspect that this is not only the source but the actuality of spirit; spirit is a kind of delusion, a fantasy (but then again, for Allen, all truth is a form of fantasy until it isn't). Spirit is this predication, the ability to see oneness where there isn't any; this is also the essence of rhetoric for Allen. That form of seeing deeply matters; it involves how we decide who is whom and what is what, the way we make sense of the world. It is the basis of politics, of our troubled freedom.Allen takes maximal advantage of this human propensity to predicate. He seizes upon it as a way to be able to say something about the world, about language and rhetoric itself (in this way this book is itself a superb example of spirit). It is our mistaken reading of the world as having meaning and truth in it that gives us a modicum of meaning and truth (another version of “if you build it”). The reader or listener or viewer's mistaken belief causes us to live as if amidst what we think must exist. And so it does (as far as we are concerned). Allen several times quotes Wittgenstein's comment that “something must be taught as a foundation” (1). It doesn't seem to matter just what that foundation is (since there are no actual foundations); since we have to have a foundation, we will certainly find one.This is where the connection between truth and fantasy becomes so important in The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory. In Allen's view, all truth is initially fantasy. In some sense it remains fantasy the whole time but insofar as there has to be a foundation, and since a foundation can't be read as a fantasy, for a time at least, a fantasy becomes true, until it is displaced by another truth and so on (actually I think that Allen shows us that it is much more complicated than this; in fact many truths are coming into being and then leaving in multiple discordant fashion at different and overlapping times, but we must read all of this, Allen says, as if it were coherent and so it is, once again, so far as we are concerned).As a response to this understanding of truth, Allen offers us what he calls a “chastened humanism” (220). He is interested in the concept of posthumanism, but he has a few hesitations about embracing such a position himself. He worries that to think oneself as being posthuman suggests the possibility of transcending limitations that human beings can't transcend (otherwise we wouldn't have a troubled freedom, we'd have most likely no freedom at all insofar as those limits are critical to what makes that freedom possible in the first place). For Allen we must embrace our own self-consciousness because this is a critical part of how we navigate our position as truth-makers. In a sense, we must be in on our own fraud in order not to be completely taken over by it and succumb to the very kinds of teleologies that Allen tells us that rhetorical theory helps us to trouble. He writes, “Humanism, chastened by this acknowledgment [of the fantastic nature of truth], is no celebration; it is a straightforward way of negotiating a hard limit. Posthumanism is no more a stance that can be taken up by actual human animals than is objectivity” (104).This is one of the rare places in the book where I found myself pushing back a bit on what Allen is saying, but it might just reflect our respective understandings of the term “posthumanism.” I haven't read posthumanism (at least some versions of it) as seeking to transcend humanity so much as similarly seeking to trouble it (not unlike Allen himself). I wholeheartedly agree that it is a mistake to try to imagine ourselves as no longer being human or occupying a nonhuman perspective. That's more like what the transhumanists do: transcend death and even humanness itself. Posthumanism, as I understand it, is itself somewhat chastened, but I don't want to split hairs over what might simply be a semantic difference.Chastened humanism is perhaps a better term than posthumanism because it doesn't mean abandoning roots and imagined origins but just recognizing our own lack of domination and control over the process we are moving through and being shaped by; it means recognizing the way spirit shapes our lives and serves as our ever-changing temporal and spatial envelope of possibility. A chastened humanism could also be given as the name for Allen's methodology in this book, which I would summarize as a style of thinking and writing where nothing is abandoned but nothing is allowed to dominate either. Except for his one axiom (that humans must predicate), Allen doesn't assume anything further. He allows rhetorical theory to exist in all of its glorious complexity and incoherence (and coherence too). So for example, one set of points that he sees as integral to the body and shape of rhetorical theory is a complicated relationship to its classical past. There is both continuity and discontinuity between that tradition and modern times, and there is no getting around that relationship even if it has been discarded or disavowed. This may not seem “methodological,” but I would submit that it is. The method in this case is to simultaneously accept two seemingly contradictory modalities, the fact that language is both chaotic and meaningful at the same time. Accordingly, the way that “modern” rhetorical theory predicates itself (and predicate we must!) is by saying either that it stems from classical rhetoric or that it doesn't stem from classical rhetoric. There doesn't seem to be any way around that relationship. Rather than see this as an impossible contradiction, Allen doesn't sweat this. He allows this to simply be, part of the spirit of rhetoric.Similarly, Allen allows for a multiplicity of what he calls “focalizers,” namely the sense of the “all,” the “many” the “some” and the “one,” to coexist despite the fact that they are at times patently contradictory. For example, to distinguish between conviction and persuasion, there needs to be an elicited sense of “the all,” that is to say the true and absolute audience that serves (even though it doesn't actually exist) as a witness to a truth; that is how you get the possibility of conviction. The many or some need not be true audiences either (or not as true anyway; I think there can be gradations rather than separation between these quantities; this too can be both a set of particles and a wave). These focalizers help to give dimension and heft to the practice of rhetorical theory without needing to be either ontologically true or in harmony with other focalizers.The final element in Allen's account of what could be called the material or substantive nature of rhetorical theory is the symbol, a notion that he derives in part from the work of Kenneth Burke. The symbol is a kind of working model of troubled freedom, a predication that can't ever be true but that has an enduring power of its own. One very concrete example that Allen gives of how the symbol can affect the world without a monopoly on truth (quite the contrary) comes in his discussion of how Burke thinks about constitutions. Burke suggests that in terms of constitutional law “what is really mandatory upon the court is a new act” (227). In other words, novelty and the circulation of laws and interpretations is what gives the law its life and its motion and indeed its spirit. This is a good example of how some things very tangible (laws, constitutions) are not prevented but enabled by their own contingent nature (in this case, via the category of newness).Here, you can get a sense of how all of the disparate parts that Allen focuses on fit together despite being wholly unalike; symbolism, focalizers, the relationship between the modern and the classic tradition, it is all part of the materiality of rhetorical theory. These things don't have to be truly true (which is fortunate because they aren't). They certainly aren't eternal or constant. There is nothing of the “idea” here. Or rather there is but in a sense that is closer to Walter Benjamin than Plato. Benjamin tells us that the idea isn't found in some ideal transcendent space but rather in each and every expression of a category. So for example, if you could gather every possible rendition of a chair—including chairs that don't really seem to be chairs at all, or maybe even everything that one could use as a chair that isn't a chair—you would effectively have the “idea” of a chair before you (although you couldn't possibly have them all literally before you). The idea is itself a kind of symbol, but it's a symbol that successfully—at least in its form as an idea—seems to encompass something in all of its material presence, its way of being and changing in space and time (that's the other thing; you'd need to know what a chair was going to be like in ten thousand years, ten million years too). As such, the idea suggests a kind of transcendent status, but I would actually say that it really has descendent status, that is, it is the essence of materialism in all of its aleatory and contingent multiplicity.This connects to the last thing I want to say and appreciate about Allen's book. This is a book about the ordinary and the every day. Allen celebrates ordinary freedoms, doxa in all of its banal variety. This is a book about not heroic truths but humbler, more chastened sorts of truths. I think this books shows how we can live without transcendent heights, without the need for perfection and true unity. As such, I would say this is a radically democratic and indeed highly anarchist book. The fact that Allen shows us how we can have truth and predication, a sedimented world that we can sink our teeth into, even without the requirement for higher laws and absolute truths and facts saves us from thinking that we need recourse to the kind of transcendent laws that are the stuff of archaism. For this reason alone (but there are many other reasons too), I think Allen has done us all a great and vital service.

Les études récentes sur Synesius de Cyrène rejettent de plus en plus la thèse traditionnelle qui le considérait comme un nouveau venu dans le christianisme, pour le considérer plutôt comme un chrétien flexible et antidogmatique. Cependant, tout en reflétant notre meilleure compréhension de l’expérience de la religion vécue à la fin de l’Antiquité, cette position néglige un aspect crucial de l’idenrité religieuse de Synesius: son auto-récit. À travers une étude des stratégies rhétoriques utilisées par Synesius pour communiquer son allégeance religieuse, cet article soutient que Synesius a plutôt cherché des moyens de se présenter comme un concurrent du christianisme et de ses représentants les plus éminents. Le « sophiste » Synesius (défini comme tel en dépit, ou mieux, en vertu de ses prétentions à ne pas en être un), caractérisé par la recherche d’une identite oppositionnelle construite a l’aide de la rhetorique traditionnelle, apparait ainsi comme incamant la tension entre innovation et continuite qui marque la Troisieme sophistique au IVe siecle.

This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilla in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.

Reviewed by: The War of Words by Kenneth Burke M. Elizabeth Weiser Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 “For it is by the war of words that men are led into battle,” Kenneth Burke asserts in his new book, The War of Words (248). How a man dead these twenty-seven years has come to have a “new” book is not a better story than how prescient is the book, how pointedly this work—written and largely revised by 1950—speaks to our times. Burke’s overarching concern is the impetus to war that he saw all around him in the years immediately following World War II—all in some ways particular to his era. But the rhetoric by which geopolitical forces worked their magic to convince the American public to support their aims—these are universal. Or as Burke writes, “The particulars change from day to day, but the principle they embody recurs constantly, in other particulars” (45). In The War of Words, the editors have uncovered among Burke’s papers his Downward Way, the practical, applied counterpart to his Upward Way [End Page 242] of philosophizing about the universal nature of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (and its precursor, A Grammar of Motives). After a brief historical introduction from the editors—part context, part explanation of their editing process—the text is Burke’s alone, consisting of two largely completed sections and two sections for which he made substantial notes. As the editors put it, “‘The War of Words’ was designed from the start to be the analytic realization of Burke’s theory of the rhetorical motive. . . .Without The War of Words, [A Rhetoric of Motives] remains incomplete” (30). If Burke’s ultimate purpose in his motivorium trilogy was ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification of war,” then his optimistic general theory of identification was to be counterbalanced with the shrewder practical analysis of rhetoric in everyday life, the war of words. For various reasons outlined by the editors, this Downward Way was never published, meaning that for some seventy years rhetoricians have been attempting to apply Burke’s theories to the analysis of scenes, acts, and agents in the world around us. It is a tremendously useful addition to the canon, therefore, to find Burke’s own original attempts to do the same. Thus, for instance, while in A Rhetoric of Motives Burke describes identification as identifying our interests with another’s, becoming consubstantial, in War of Words he describes the dangers of identification with a necessarily expansionist nationalism: “It is the deprived persons at home who, impoverished because so much of the national effort is turned to the resources of foreign aggression rather than to the improvement of domestic conditions, it is precisely these victims of nationalistic aggressiveness whose fervor is most readily enlisted through the imagery of sheerly vicarious participation in the power of our nationally subsidized corporations abroad” (251). That he was describing those fervent supporters of a Cold War buildup and not those fervent supporters of Donald Trump serves only to demonstrate the ways in which American exceptionalism relies on similar rhetorical devices in the scene-act ratio that keeps the world on edge. His first section, “The Devices,” then, shows Burke categorizing strategies much as he did with theories in RM, updating and expanding upon classical rhetorical strategies to show how they function in the modern world. The Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection (“so general an end that nearly all the Logomachy [the War of Words] could be included under it” [68]), Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the unifying achievements and paranoias of “us”), Making the Connection—these ten devices, a multitude of examples, and the theory behind them make up the first 125 pages of The War of Words. That multitude of examples, often confusing for readers of Burke’s longer texts, here in their somewhat condensed form work well. Don’t understand a description of a device? Read an example of it. Don’t understand that example? There are five or ten more, ranging...

L’expression “Troisième Sophistique” a commencé à être utilisée, à partir des annees 1990, pour designer les orateurs et rheteurs grecs du ive siècle apres J.-C, et elle a suscité des débats. Les principales questions qui se posent portent sur la définition et l’extension chronologique du concept auquel renvoie cette expression : s’applique-t-elle aux praticiens et aux théoriciens de la rhetorique au sens strict, ou doit-elle être élargie pour inclure d’autres catégories d’écrivains et d’intellectuels ? Est-elle limitée au ive siècle après J.-C. ou se prolonge-t-elle jusqu’aux siècles sui-vants ? S’agit-il seulement des païens, ou existe-t-il aussi une Troisieme Sophistique chrétienne ? Ces questions pouvant admet-tre des réponses diverses, les choix que Ton opère engagent la manière de concevoir le role de la rhetorique dans la societe et la periodisation de l’histoire de la rhétorique.

The Third Sophistic Laurent Pernot Foreword The Third Sophistic is a cultural and social phenomenon that began in the Greek half of the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE. It comprised personalities who were teachers of rhetoric, orators, and public figures. The numeral adjective “Third” is understood in reference to the First Sophistic, which includes Greek sophists of the 5th and 4th century BCE, and the Second Sophistic, which includes Greek sophists active in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 3rd century CE. This is a relatively new subject in the field of history of rhetoric and it has been the topic of much recent research: the time to assess the work done and to open future prospects has come. The following essays aim to provide a definition of the Third Sophistic. They describe historical changes, explore geographical areas, unravel social and familial connections, and highlight exceptional individualities. It is hoped that this collection will provide insights into the richness of Greco-Roman rhetoric of Late Antiquity and demonstrate its relevance to literature, politics, and religion. A chronology and a bibliography are provided below for the convenience of readers. L. P. N.B. Of the three papers gathered here, the first two were presented at the ISHR Twenty-First Biennial Conference (London, 26–29 July 2017) as part of the Panel “The Third Sophistic and Its Spaces.” [End Page 174] Chronological Table This chronological table lists the principal authors that are mentioned in the papers. The dates are sometimes approximate or conjectural. The cited names do not only include sophists. 5th cent. BCE Gorgias (480–380) 4th Plato (427–347) Aeschines (390-after 330) 3rd 2nd 1st Potamon of Mytilene (75 BCE –15 CE) 1st cent. CE 2nd Aelius Aristides (117–180) Lucian (120–180) 3rd Philostratus (170–245) Callinicus of Petra (Second half of the 3rd cent.) Julian of Cappadocia (?) Menander Rhetor (Second half of the 3rd cent.) Panegyrici Latini 4th Eusebius of Caesarea (265–339) Prohaeresius (277–369) Lactantius (+325) Libanius (314–393) Themistius (317–390) Himerius (310–390) The Emperor Julian (331/2–363) Aphthonius (Second half of the 4th cent.) Gregory of Nazianzus (330–390) Gregory of Nyssa (330–395) Basil of Caesarea (329–379) John Chrysostom (345–407) Eunapius (349–415) Panegyrici Latini (Cont.) Marius Victorinus (290–365) Symmachus (340–402) Ambrose (335–397) Augustine (354–430) 5th Synesius (370–413) The School of Gaza Damascius (460–538) 6th The School of Gaza [End Page 175] Select Bibliography E. Amato, A. Roduit, M. Steinruck, ed., Approches de la Troisiéme Sophistique: Hommages à Jacques Schamp (Bruxelles: Latomus, 2006). Google Scholar Av. Cameron, “Culture Wars: Late Antiquity and Literature,” in C. Freu, S. Janniard, A. Ripoll, ed., ”Libera Curiositas.” Melanges d’histoire romaine et d’Antiquité tar-dive offerts à Jean-Michel Carrié (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 307–316. Google Scholar R. C. Fowler, ed., Plato in the Third Sophistic (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). Google Scholar D. Hernández de la Fuente, “Poetry and Philosophy at the Boundaries of Byzantium (5th-7th centuries),” in A. de Francisco Heredero, D. Hernández de la Fuente, S. Torres Prieto, ed., New Perspectives on Late Antiquity in the Eastern Roman Empire (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 81–100. Google Scholar P. Kimball, ed., “The Third Sophistic: New Approaches to Rhetoric in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Late Antiquity 3 (2010). Google Scholar M. Kraus, “Rhetorik und Macht: Theorie und Praxis der deliberativen Rede in der dritten Sophistik. Libanios und Aphthonios,” in M. Edwards, P. Ducrey, P. Derron, ed., La rhetorique du pouvoir: une exploration de Vart oratoire délibératif grec (Vandœuvres: Fondation Hardt, 2016), 299–341. Google Scholar P.-L. Malosse, B. Schouler, “Qu’est-ce que la Troisième Sophistique?” Lalies 29 (2009): 157–224. Google Scholar R. J. Penella, “Prologue,” in A. J. Quiroga Puertas, ed., The Purpose of Rhetoric in Late Antiquity: From Performance to Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 1–7. Google Scholar L. Pernot, La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, 1993). Google Scholar A. J. Quiroga Puertas, “From Sophistopolis to Episcopolis. The Case...

ince the 2016 election, activism and protests have garnered increasing media attention. At the same time, the conduct of individuals involved in social movements is intensely scrutinized by politicians and the public at large who label these protests obscene, unruly, or even violent. The edited collection Unruly Rhetorics attempts to address the fraught implications of "civility" in an age characterized by political tension and the rise of neoliberalism. Community Literacy Journal readers will find this collection to be an important resource for community organizing and deliberative rhetoric as many chapters discuss the rhetorical power of dissent. Activists and community organizers will also find that Unruly Rhetorics gives credence to the struggles they face every day in the public eye as they fight for equality and justice.

Reviewed by: Principal Writings on Rhetoric by Philipp Melanchthon Kees Meerhoff Philipp Melanchthon, Principal Writings on Rhetoric. Edited by William P. Weaver, Stefan Strohm, and Volkhard Wels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. liv + 594 pp. ISBN 9783110561197 Publication of a brand new, state-of-the-art critical edition of Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) major writings on rhetoric is excellent news for all scholars working in the field of Renaissance rhetoric. The volume under discussion here is the very first of a multi-volume edition of the opera philosophic, that is, of all major writings concerning the arts curriculum, taught according to the highest standards of humanism. Volume II-2 will be supplemented by a volume (II-l) in which the writings on dialectic will be published. This volume will also be of particular interest to students of rhetoric, since Melanchthon—following Valla’s and Agricola’s lead—placed dialectic at the heart of rhetoric. Melanchthon firmly believed in the classical [End Page 118] conception of the enkyklios paideia, so eloquently highlighted by Cicero in his oration Pro Archia, which was, not by accident, one of Melanchthon’s favourite speeches. True to the author’s conception, already expressed in his inaugural lecture (1518), the opera philosophies series will also republish his writings on grammar, classical literature, history, ethics, politics, physics, and mathematics. Moreover, since Melanchthon defended his philosophical conceptions on numerous occasions, either personally or by proxy, the final volume will contain his famous declamations concerning all areas of academic teaching. In short, this major enterprise, undertaken by the director of the Melanchthouhaus in Bretten, Günter Frank, and by church historian Walter Sparn, will supersede the previous editions of Melanchthon’s writings, notably the Bretschneider & Bindseil twenty-eight-volume edition published in the Corpus Rcformatontm over the course of the nineteenth century and the so-called MSA-edition of selected writings directed by R. Stupperich and published from 1951 onward. Volume II-2 contains the three textbooks on rhetoric published by Melanchthon in 1519, 1521, and 1531. These textbooks are supplemented by the republication of H. Zwicker’s earlier edition of the Dispositiones rhetoricae (1553), which first appeared in 1911 and was reprinted in 1968. These Dispositiones offer 160 outlines of speeches on all kind of matters and are thus working examples of declamations written according to the rules of composition proposed in the textbooks. Melanchthon’s writings on homiletics (De officiis conionatoris, etc.) are not included in the volume. But they are discussed through the annotations concerning the sections on preaching one finds in the textbooks from the very start. The volume is co-ordinated by William Weaver. Weaver is the editor of the 1521 Institutiones rhetoricae. Stefan Strohm, assisted by Hartmut Schmid, edited the 1519 De rhetorica libri tres. And Volkhard Wels was responsible for editing the 1531 Elementorum rehtorices libri duo. I shall refer to them as Editor B, A, and C, respectively. All texts are published in Latin, without translation; the introductions and annotations are either in English or in German. The quotations given in the notes are in Greek and in Latin. A modern translation with Greek key words added in brackets, especially for the longer quotations in Greek (of Aristotle, Plutarch, etc.), would have been defensible, if not preferable. Each editor enjoyed maximum scientific freedom in accomplishing his formidable task. And each individual edition offers not only a perfectly established text, but also a rich critical apparatus and a wealth of explanatory notes. The introductions and annotations demonstrate in a definitive way the importance of classical and humanist sources in Melanchthon’s writings. Among his humanist predecessors, Agricola and Erasmus are Melanchthon’s key authors; but, at a certain stage, George of Trebizond also played a remarkable part. Erasmus is the chief source, not only as the author of De copia and similar writings, but also as an interpreter of the Scriptures and as a collector of ancient wisdom in the Adagia. With Agricola, he is the great ancestor, who already conceived of rhetoric in close relationship to exegesis and homiletics and who advocated for an eloquence fuelled by [End Page 119] ancient literature. For Melanchthon as well, rhetoric became a tool for analysing...

Reviewed by: Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion by Ann George Kyle Jensen Ann George. Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2018. xvi + 279 pp. ISBN 9781611179316 It is difficult to appreciate the full achievement of Ann George’s Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion unless one has firsthand experience with Kenneth Burke’s extant papers. All archival research is challenging, of course. But Burke’s papers are especially difficult to manage because of the volume and fecundity of his drafting materials. These materials encourage a persistent feeling of insecurity, that hard-won moments of clarity will be run off by new and unexpected variables. I am not surprised that it took George twenty years to track “P&C’s development, theoretical arguments, critical methodologies, and civic pedagogy” (24). Her erudite analysis indicates the time was well spent. George navigates the complicated arguments of Permanence and Change with characteristic precision and grace. In Part I, she addresses the core concepts of Burke’s argument such as piety, perspective by incongruity, metabiology, and the art of living. In Part II, she presents an extended archival account of the book’s production and reception history that complicates prevailing assumptions about Burke’s work as a critic. The two parts are connected by George’s claim that Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change is the originating work of the New Rhetoric. [End Page 116] To make payment on this claim, George emphasizes the value of reading Burke in context. In each chapter, she presents Burke as a writer responding to the problems posed by his historical moment and needing to revise his perspectives as the scene evolved. Because Burke’s interpretation of key events and their resolutions underwent constant revision, critics hoping to understand his arguments must engage with not only his published works but also his extant drafting materials. In between the drafts, we discover a groundbreaking civic pedagogy that will compel new and expert Burke scholars alike. George identifies metabiology as the “ethical grounding for [Burke’s] proposed cultural reorientation.” In doing so, she claims that his insights remain relevant for the contemporary moment (56). George makes this case convincingly, arguing that Burke’s account of human motives “creates the scene and the means that allow Americans to fulfill their deepest human needs, and as they participate in collaborative civic conversations, they instantiate and reaffirm, for themselves and each other, their commitment to democratic values” (224). Forum constraints prevent me from listing the full array of praiseworthy features in George’s book. So, I will focus on what seem to me her most profound contributions. First, George presents perspective by incongruity as a multi-layered concept. There is a reasonable temptation to limit the scope of perspective by incongruity by noting its capacity to denaturalize well established cultural “truths.” But within Burke’s civic pedagogy, perspective by incongruity has “different levels . . . for different situations”: “a freewheeling, outrageous cultural critique by an ‘analyst’/artist/rhetor or an individual who is already alienated from the dominant culture versus the more conciliatory rhetorical means by which piously reluctant audiences can be led to new ways of seeing” (50). Second, when discussing metabiology as purification of war, George presents five different scenes that elucidate the nuances of Burke’s thinking and thus add considerable depth to our understanding of his civic pedagogy. According to George, the purification of war demands that we address simultaneously the interconnections between our biological, cultural, pragmatic, economic, and militaristic assumptions. George’s claim is particularly suggestive because it implies that later works such as A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives evolve from Permanence & Change. Having spent nearly a decade working on the archival histories of A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words, I concur with this assertion. Much of what appears in A Rhetoric of Motives is an extension and/or revision of Burke’s earlier arguments. Finally, George claims that Burke’s civic pedagogy is both m extension and revision of epideictic rhetoric. It extends by examining how particular orientations “train people to accept certain ways of knowing and judging...

Reviewed by: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes by Timothy Raylor Torrey Shanks Timothy Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvii + 334 pp. ISBN 9780198829690 In a meticulous and learned account of Thomas Hobbes’s lifelong relationship to rhetoric and humanism, Timothy Raylor takes up the peculiar but important challenge of proving that something did not happen. That something is Hobbes’s famed double turn, his rejection of humanist rhetoric followed later by a modified return to rhetoric, as defended in Quentin Skinner’s influential study, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Raylor presents a [End Page 121] Hobbes steadfast in his relationship to both rhetoric and humanism, in contrast to his sharper and unrepentant philosophical turn. The book is provocative in its scrutinizing and overturning of Skinner’s thesis, where it largely sets its sights. It also provokes questions beyond that horizon for the theory and practice of rhetoric in putatively rationalist philosophy. One of several important contributions of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes is its laser-like focus on the specific rhetorical and humanist traditions from which Hobbes drew insight over the long span of his life. Attending closely to his early pedagogical pursuits with the Cavendish family, the book discerns Hobbes’s commitments among a broad range of humanist and rhetorical approaches available to him. It speaks of Raylor’s attunement to the rhetorical tradition that he weighs pedagogical activities and topics so significantly. The examination of Hobbes’s work as a young tutor and nascent poet take up his incontrovertibly rhetorical humanist phase, during which, Raylor emphasizes, he harbored the pragmatic and skeptical tendencies of a Tacitean more than a Ciceronian civic republican. While Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides distances him from Cicero, the The Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique reveals his enduring commitment to Aristotelian notions of rhetoric. Though he was no ethical Aristotelian, Hobbes found in the Rhetoric a guiding structure of thought that was further inflected through Francis Bacon. Drawing Bacon into the humanist fold, Raylor rightly challenges anachronistic habits of opposing aesthetics and reason, poetry and science, in seventeenth-century philosophy. One benefit is in his richly layered reading of an early poem, De mirabilibus pecci. The poem incorporates catalogue of wonders, travel writing, and epideictic rhetoric, intertwining aesthetic pleasure, knowledge of natural history, and currying favour. Hobbes’s humanism takes new shape here as a contribution to the concerns and methods of an emerging natural scientific inquiry. This is a less familiar Hobbes and a path not taken for a thinker who later championed materialism at the expense of experiential knowledge. Hobbes abandoned natural history, but other Aristotelian tenets endured: a division of knowledge into scientia and opinio and a rhetoric attuned to the passions and pragmatically aimed at persuasion over loftier ethical goals. Crucial evidence for this is found in Hobbes’s choice to teach Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to prepare a Latin Digest and English Briefe. The documents, Raylor argues, do not reject rhetorical humanist (read Ciceronian) culture, but rather offer “a reasonable interpretation and apt condensation of Aristotle” (169). Aristotelian rhetoric is instead the structure through which Hobbes would effect a momentous change a decade later. Reorienting Hobbes’s rhetorical humanist phase around a Baconian Aristotelianism leads to the conclusion that “[i]t is not rhetoric that Hobbes, at the end of the 1630s, rejects, but philosophy—philosophy as it has traditionally been practiced” (176). Philosophy becomes the problem and object of transformation, not rhetoric. Moreover, rhetorical study becomes the driving factor in this reconceptualization of ratiocination. [End Page 122] The Rhetoric helped Hobbes to see that too much of what passed for philosophy was not certain or universal but drawn upon arguments meant to persuade, yielding, at best, probable truths. The natural histories that once interested him are based merely on “experience of fact,” producing only appearances of knowledge (201). With the demotion of natural philosophy, Hobbes elevates and transforms the study of politics into a science grounded in logical demonstration of causes from clearly defined terms, like geometry. Civil philosophy, in other words, is torn from its rhetorical roots in dialectical reasoning, experiential or prudential knowledge, and persuasion...

This article explores how “flatten the curve” (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises.

When, after having registered for the ninth grade, I told my dad I was going to take Latin, he raised an eyebrow and a question: “Why?” Thinking it would be a reason a practical person like him wou...

This essay will demonstrate how both the cultural and temporal antecedents of classical rhetoric are linked to Mesopotamian writing by their shared use of similes, such as fable, aenigma, and parable as pardeigmae. Mesopotamian myths employed allegory and aenigma to advance a cultural argument that intersects with common theoretical topics in ancient rhetoric through analogical reasoning. Finally, this essay will introduce this obscure but highly relevant source of rhetorical thinking from Mesopotamia and their culturally transmitted theories in a neglected primary source, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. This brief epic shares similar philosophical ground with ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric, and addresses rhetoric’s fundamental nature at a much earlier point in history than accounted for in existing histories of classical rhetoric.

Discussions about communication and education have become focused on social justice in recent years, and with good reason. Social justice is at the forefront of many aspects of our daily lives in news, education, and even entertainment. As digital rhetoricians and educators, we have found ourselves looking for ways to work at the intersections of our field and social justice to improve both learning experiences and networked communication in non-academic contexts. This work is both timely and needed, as the hierarchies and inequities experienced in "real life" often translate to, and are amplified by, networked and digital forms of engagement. Fortunately, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues offers an insightful and practical discussion about ethical frameworks that contribute to our understanding of digital social justice. Colton and Holmes persuasively argue for the value of Aristotle's virtue ethics, especially the idea of hexis , as a model for empowering students, educators, and others to enact digital social justice. As they explain, Aristotle identified virtues "such as patience, courage, temperance, and liberality" that contribute to ethical behavior and "are developed not solely through reason or by learning rules but through practice of the emotional and social skills that enable us within a community to work toward...human flourishing and general well-being" (p. 32). An essential part of Aristotle's framework is hexis , a person's disposition that has been crafted through habit and repeated practice (p. 11). Colton and Holmes effectively demonstrate how a virtue ethics framework can empower individuals to take ownership of the ethical implications of digital practices. Throughout the book, Colton and Holmes address familiar topics in digital rhetoric ranging from captioning (pp. 3--5, 49--73), remixing (pp. 74--94), and issues inherent in online activism (pp. 95--126).

Discussions of demagoguery are, unfortunately, back in vogue in popular political discourse. Within the contemporary political landscape, the question of whether various world leaders should be considered demagogues abounds. In the American context, many perceive strong demagogic tendencies in President Donald Trump, and others see it in candidates like Bernie Sanders. This assessment, while perhaps not always stated in such specific terms, is prevalent throughout much of the rhetoric in public debate and deliberation, with Democrats and Republicans demonizing each other with more frequency. While this discussion seems particularly relevant to the contemporary political climate, demagoguery as a term dates all the way back to some of the earliest political philosophers of the Western tradition. The term's origin was decidedly neutral, as can be seen in the likes of Aristophanes and Thucydides. Donald Trump is, in the most neutral sense of the term, a demagogue. That is to say that Trump is a leader of a group of people, a fact that his 2016 election victory affirms. Trump may also be a demagogue in the more charged sense of the word. This more charged definition finds its roots in Plato and Aristotle, who began to complicate the term before Plutarch defined the term with a negative valence that has stuck. A critical aspect of defining demagoguery in the contemporary lexicon is a focus on how an individual's rhetorical moves, with unique personal motivations, drive a public toward us versus them binaries. Much of the scholarship on the Nazis and Adolf Hitler is an exemplar of this obsession with individualistic demagoguery, as it often elucidates personal motives for Hitler's demagogic rhetoric toward the Jews. Since Hitler is considered by many to be the demagogue par excellence and some of this understanding can be traced to Kenneth Burke, this conception of demagoguery as something enacted by a particular speaker has remained dominant in rhetorical study and political philosophy.Against such a backdrop, Patricia Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely intervention into how we define and think about demagoguery. In order to accomplish such a task, Roberts-Miller traces the way demagoguery is currently envisioned, explains the deficits of that conceptualization, provides a new working definition grounded in argumentation theory, and then uses a series of examples to support her argument. Roberts-Miller takes issue with defining demagoguery as the intentional use of scapegoating by a liberal autonomous subject. For many scholars, it is easier to explain rampant discrimination, fascism, and violence as something spurred by an individual speaker rather than addressing what allowed that message to take root.Roberts-Miller therefore criticizes this approach and provides a redefinition of demagoguery as “a polarizing discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the out-group should be punished and scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group” (16). Further, she contends that public policy debate in a demagogic society tends to focus on only three things: group identity, need, and severity of punishment against the out-group. To elucidate the features that flow from this definition, Roberts-Miller draws on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concept of philosophical paired terms. This terminology, which she rephrases as binary paired terms, shows how societal demagoguery relies on binaries, which usually circle back to in-group versus out-group driven decision making. This allows rhetors to skip deliberation and sound argumentation and simply assert their position. Roberts-Miller further theorizes how these dynamics mean that political debate focuses on nonfalsifiable motivism rather than specific policy proposals. Roberts-Miller accomplishes much of this method and theory building in the introductory and concluding chapters, advancing specific case studies in the body chapters that help elucidate and nuance her redefinition.The first example Roberts-Miller turns to is the invasion of Iraq, explored in depth in chapter 1. Roberts-Miller explains that what made her write this book was the almost entirely absent policy debate prior to the invasion of Iraq. Roberts-Miller argues that policy debate must address both need and a plan. To be clear, there was plenty of ideological pseudo-debate about need in the lead-up to the invasion, but Roberts-Miller points out there was hardly any concrete policy discussion about what plans might be considered. Beginning with the necessary background information on the lead-up to this war, Roberts-Miller then pivots to an explanation of how identity was substituted for policy. President George W. Bush and his administration did all they could to avoid discussion of a particular plan for Iraq. Such deliberation, in their view, would have delayed and bogged down support for the war effort. Rather, they simply called out anyone who did not support going to war as unpatriotic, showing how identity trumped deliberation and the patriotic/unpatriotic binary flourished. The Bush administration also enacted a binary between the “Christian West” and “Muslim Middle East” as a way to further stake the war on identities rather than sound, policy debate. With these binaries, Roberts-Miller shows how the conditions for the disastrous Iraq War were achieved through demagogic rhetoric. Many in Congress and the public positioned debate itself as being anti-American, instead opting for naïve, patriotic support of the war. Without a strong policy debate, the American war strategy relied purely on best-case scenarios that did not happen. According to Roberts-Miller, relying on public debate, rather than demagoguery, may have prevented the invasion of Iraq or “at worst, have led to a better-planned war” with contingencies being considered (47).Chapter 2 builds on the binary paired terms of punishment and reward, using a number of case studies to exemplify how these terms are used in demagogic rhetoric. The first explored is Cleon from Ancient Athens. Cleon sets up the binary of everyone being either a friend or enemy and every act being either reward or punishment. Roberts-Miller works this pairing into a unique ratio of punish/enemy and reward/friend, which characterize demagoguery writ large. Cleon's “rational” assessment here shows the risks of defining demagoguery as primarily invested in leveraging emotional appeals. As Roberts-Miller pointedly observes, definitions of demagoguery as speech driven by mere strong affects is misguided since a speaker could provide good argumentation grounded in emotion, and, conversely, a speaker might be able to perform “emotionless” rationality without solid evidence. Instead, as Roberts-Miller explains through examples ranging from segregationists in the south to the Supreme Court decision in Hirabayashi v. United States, to illustrate how those claiming calm rationality, often through an invented middle ground, can actually perpetrate demagogic binaries and policies. In Hirabayashi, this worked its way back into a punishment/reward binary where Japanese Americans were falsely blamed (scapegoated) for sabotage during the attack on Pearl Harbor and were in need of punishment (internment).In chapter 3, Roberts-Miller elaborates further upon the features of her definition of demagoguery: scapegoating and rationality. Looking deeper into Japanese internment in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Roberts-Miller expands beyond the Hirabayashi ruling to examine the Roberts Commission and California attorney general Earl Warren's supposedly emotionless arguments for imprisonment. A critical component of this appeal was Warren's surface-level reasonability and a supposed willingness to let the facts guide the debate surrounding internment. However, once one digs beneath the surface, it becomes clear that this rationality is merely a façade. Roberts-Miller points to a lack of evidence that there was any Japanese American involvement in Pearl Harbor and the difference in treatment between Japanese Americans and German and Italian Americans as proof of prejudice rather than deliberation guiding decision making. This is used to prove that rationality markers are often deployed to conflate the difference between a logical argument and an argument that is made by appealing to logic. Ultimately, the Japanese were interned not because of logic in and of itself but because demagoguery cast them as an entity Americans should fear through misleading appeals to a nonexistent logic.Chapter 4 moves from a discussion of demagoguery that appeals to logic that, while flawed, is easy to understand to demagoguery that relies on argumentation that claims rationality but intentionally obfuscates logic. The case study here is Madison Grant's racist book Passing of the Great Race, which is considered a historically significant white supremacist text because of its prevalence in America and its appreciation by Hitler himself. Roberts-Miller deftly dissects Grant's demagogic argument for the superiority of the white/Nordic race through the inconsistencies in logic. Some specific problems include Grant's lack of definition for his central term “race,” an evolutionary narrative that undercuts his claims to Nordic purity, and his practically nonexistent use of citations or appeals to authority. Roberts-Miller highlights how even those contemporary reviewers who assessed the book positively cited its poor quality of argument as a negative element. Thus, with his claims not clearly grounded in proper citations, Grant's authority comes from himself. Roberts-Miller's takedown of Grant works well to boost her claim that demagoguery can guise itself with pseudo-logic, while actually being logic's antithesis.Roberts-Miller's next move is to show how demagogic rhetoric can appeal to expert opinion and be seemingly intellectual, when it is actually anti-intellectual. Chapter 5 focuses on three case studies of nonscientists—E. S. Cox, Theodore Bilbo, and William Tam—who claimed appeals to authority and that science supported their positions (with Cox and Bilbo espousing white supremacy and Tam arguing homophobic viewpoints against gay marriage). Cox relies heavily on authorities whom he believes are right because they are good people (i.e., white). Bilbo's arguments often contradict his sources, and his sources often contradict each other. Further, the Bilbo case study works to show how demagoguery is not always a calculated maneuver, as Bilbo's political career would have been better served with a less overtly racist message. Finally, Tam shows how poor, demagogic citation practices can flourish in the digital age. Tam deflected numerous questions about his sources and the facticity of his homophobic claims as being found on the Internet, which he implicitly claimed must make them true. Here, Roberts-Miller advances more theoretical insights on the anti-intellectualism of demagoguery, bolstered most compellingly by her selection of cases that all relied on so-called expert appeals to science and, with Tam, the Internet as a whole.Roberts-Miller's conclusion again reiterates her redefinition of demagoguery and why this book has provided an important move to understanding the culture of demagoguery. Roberts-Miller then lists some topics that she could not explore in depth due to length restrictions, including gender, religion, charismatic leadership, reification, demagoguery's universality, and if demagoguery harms only in cases of an essentialized out-group identity. Indeed, I was surprised that Roberts-Miller's book largely declined to give issues of gender and other power differentials greater attention in order to present a more capacious account of demagoguery. One area in particular this book could have improved on is either providing significant cases of demagoguery on the left or explaining why this omission is necessary given her theoretical redefinition. Every major example in the body chapters of this book comes from right-leaning politicians and sympathizers. While these provide stark and compelling case examples, Roberts-Miller opens by saying, “Any project that is entirely about how badly they argue is going to be a self-congratulating exercise in saying the out-group is the out-group. Trying to identify the characteristics that help people climb up the latter [sic -ladder] of extermination shouldn't be in service of purifying our communities of demagogues—we are demagogues—but in service of reflecting on what is persuading us. That's the goal of this book” (8). As such, a case study of leftist demagoguery would have done well to illustrate her point across ideological and party lines. Or if leftist demagoguery does not exist, an explanation of why that is the case would be very insightful for future research. Nevertheless, Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely and essential intervention into our conception of demagoguery in the present day. Readers of Philosophy & Rhetoric as well as those interested in political philosophy will find much practical and scholarly utility in this book.

There is arguably no region of the world that has been the object of more intellectual contempt, intellectual derision, and intellectual disregard than Africa. Scholars have long documented the dark, dreary, pernicious, and primitive “Africanism” some argue has been a (if not the) defining pillar of philosophizing, literature, criticism, and historiography in the North Atlantic for a long time. Emerging along with intentionally misconstrued yet ubiquitous constructions of blackness as other than human—negative ideas about the continent of Africa and its supposed intellectual vacuity are part of a widely circulating discourse that Kurtis Keim dubbed “mistaking Africa.” In the United States, what Toni Morrison called “American Africanism” is so routine and mundane, it is hardly notable that very few courses on African philosophy and rhetoric are offered in American colleges and universities. To witness how the epistemic disregard of African rhetorics and philosophies plays out in these familiar confines, just peruse the volumes of Philosophy & Rhetoric since its inception in 1968. Such epistemic disregard is part of the “colonizer's model of the world,” to borrow a phrase from J. M. Blaut, a model that posits Western Europe and North America as the putative center of intellectual, historic, and cultural development of humankind. The upshot of this misperception has been that for too long Africa and Africa's relation to the global emergence and circulation of ideas has been severely undertheorized, particularly in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including in philosophy and rhetoric.At the same time, what it means to live (or try to live) the good life also remains a perennially vexing problem in a number of disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, and religious studies. Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life attends to Africa's role in the intellectual world by rhetoricizing theories about the good life. Groundwork faults philosophical abstractionism for producing theories of both the good life and intellectual life in Africa that are too brittle, too idealistic, and too far removed from practical reality. The book's unstated goal, it seems, is to recommend rhetoric's penchant for particular contexts, contingency, and historicity to social theorists. In order to do that, Ochieng recovers the contingency and historicity specific to both the good life and sociopolitics in African societies. He convincingly demonstrates that the meanings of both are negotiated on an ongoing basis, and that both are shot through with contingency and interanimation. To wit, this is not a book about the good life alone nor about Africanism per se, but one whose central arguments about intellectual practice turn on the rhetorical nature both of ideas about Africa and of some of the best regarded theories of the good life. The argument in Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life is that in order to extricate both the good life and Africa from misbegotten understandings, we must rethink intellectual work away from the orthodoxy of metaphysical thought and toward the recursivity and contingency of orthopraxy. In pressing his challenge, Ochieng is undaunted: many luminaries of both African (Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Ajume Wingo, Achille Mbembe, Jean-François Bayart) and Western (Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Žižek, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Nussbaum) thought are subject to his reproach. But the goal is not just a vain naming and shaming of these individuals. Ochieng seeks instead to refigure any polarities between African and North Atlantic thought as indications of the incompleteness and irreducible entanglement of both thought systems in the catalog of human thought and practice. For him, the telos of the good life is figured rhetorically; it emerges from conditions in particular contexts.Towards this end, Ochieng offers a program for doing philosophy that is grounded in the contingencies of everyday life. Groundwork develops this program in four chapters. Chapter 1 argues that an empirical social ontology is the best framework for investigating “the good society,” which is the ideal location for the experience of the good life. The good society, Ochieng argues, is an “emergent normativity” (57), an intransitive that develops in and at the confluence of performative particulars that comprise the ontological makeup of the social: subjectivity, power, agency, and normativity (12–58). Specifically, the good society emerges through an analysis of the “interanimation of historiography”; the activation and expansion of political imagination via the (re)articulation of the political; political practice that foregrounds lived experiences over the deus ex machina of transcendentalist and metaphysically imbued political theory; and the enactment of restructurative justice through the constant remaking of the political, social, and cultural. Of these, restructurative justice best demonstrates the turn away from the abstract and universal and toward the concrete and particular. Restructurative justice obligates members of the good society to observe “egalitarianism; democratic practices; and relationships of solidarity” (90). Anchored in the recognition that structural and historical violence have affected people differently, restructurative justice is, in the first position, concerned with unsettling the structural and historical “entrenchment of privilege and power” (91). Calls to explore financial and other compensation for American descendants of enslaved persons advocated in House Bill 40 of the U.S. Congress and by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates illustrate this first commitment of restructurative justice. Additionally, restructurative justice upholds commitments to both democratic practices and solidarity, which Ochieng defines as a concern with enabling members of one's society who are otherwise unable to exert their political will to do so. This is how the terrain of the good life is cultivated.In chapter 2, Ochieng details his theory of the political in African societies, which borrows from and expands upon Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes. For Bakhtin, chronotope denotes the inextricable interwovenness of time and space. To apprehend the dynamic contingency of sociopolitics in Africa (and the good life), Ochieng infuses Bakhtin's chronotope with a “third dimension in the intersection of space and time: that of agency” (13). Adding agency to chronotope allows Ochieng to show “how structures are emergent from within history (time) as this is imbricated and bounded by horizons (space) of the possible (agency)” (13). Ochieng illustrates this argument in chapter 2, which works through an admittedly incomplete catalog of ten chronotopes in African politics. Through each theme, Ochieng returns to one point: politics in Africa is emergent from a diverse series of practices that are configured and constrained in history—they cannot be fully understood apart from ground contexts. He illustrates the chronotopics in African politics with examples from across the continent (Mali in the west, Kenya in the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center, and South Africa and Zimbabwe in the south). This chronotopic account of politics in Africa highlights “the diversity of political formations” and foregrounds “the irreducibly plural and multi-dimensional task of the political imagination” (181) attendant to the good life.Chapters 3 and 4 pivot away from politics to ethics. In chapter 3, Ochieng argues that only a meta-ethics that grows out of the social ontology and chronotopics as developed in the preceding chapters is appropriate for the contemplation of the good life. His meta-ethics “is less that of an immovable and irresistible arché and more of a web of thick relationships; an emergent patchwork of interpretive practices and a cluster of gripping values that have come to be appreciated in light of history” (193). Chapter 4 returns at last to the motivating problem of how to theorize the good life from the standpoint of interanimation, social ontology, and articulation. On this point, Ochieng argues forcefully that the good life, if it is to square with the lived realities of humans everywhere, cannot be imbued in transcendence. He contends instead, and convincingly, that the best revered models of the good life that have echoed loudest across the centuries—the hero, the saint, and the citizen—are hollow and brittle because the authority each commands issues not from the mundaneness of everyday life but out of the abstractions of theistic, mythic, and political thinking. Thus, the good life appears in much of philosophical and religious discourse as an “ideal normativity” premised on hypostatic principles that inflect away from the practicality of social ontology. Whether it is framed as a quest for a metaphysical telos (hero) or defined by universalizing abstractionism (citizen), or as emanating from origins (saint) as nebulous as they are mythical and mystical, the good life—as it is figured in the saint, the hero, and the citizen—offers “no articulation of the social ontology from which ethical action is intelligible and is effectuated” (229). Rather than draw our ethical projects from these facile personae, Ochieng urges an ethics conditioned on ground projects, which themselves “are emergent from particular forms of social relationships” and in which “justice is instantiated in and through” (229).While its central argument—that the quest for the good life is best explained as emergent and that philosophers and rhetoricians should so orient their projects—is compelling, this case, as it is advanced in Groundwork, will strike some as familiar. Readers familiar with Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, Comaroff and Comaroff's Theory from the South, Nathan Stormer's work on articulation and taxis, or Stuart Hall's work on articulation and race in The Fateful Triangle, for example, will hear familiar refrains in Groundwork. In addition, as strong a case as Groundwork makes for ground-based philosophy, it leaves a few questions unanswered. Take Ochieng's broadside against Western philosophy's proclivity for the transcendental and universal, for example. As he rightly observes, this “transcendalist delusion,” as Linda Martín Alcoff has labeled it, fails on two counts: for one, it often projects philosophers' perspectives as a “view from nowhere” (3), a neutral episteme, one that, by some ineluctable stroke of genius, is unsullied by the caprices of subjective and context-bound doxa. Second, perhaps as a consequence of the preference for transcendentalism in philosophy, it results in a willful inattention to the particularities of conditions on the ground, manifested in philosophy's preference for the abstract over the concrete (save for the cherry-picked anecdote proffered here and there). Thus, Ochieng intones in his introduction that “the very idea of rooting philosophical discourse in particular subjectivity and social context” constitutes “a betrayal of the transcendence and universality of philosophical questions” the field considers to be its purview. Yet following this line of reasoning leads to the twin challenges of delineating contexts (what to include and what to exclude in identifying a particular context), and of distinguishing different localities from each other (how to distinguish between interrelation and idiosyncrasy of contexts). In addition, recent contributions by African political theorists have moved beyond the weaknesses in Jean-François Bayart's “politics of the belly” documented in Groundwork and toward dynamic models constructed from multiple local contexts (e.g., the concepts of “pluri-politics and the politics of “ID-ology”), and in African historiography (here, one thinks of the challenges “patriotic” history in southern Africa raised by historians influenced by Terence Ranger). But these points need not dampen the appeal of the arguments laid out in Groundwork. They suggest instead a possible way of building on this project by exploring social philosophy through specific cases. This book invites us to vistas of possibility of philosophy and rhetoric's entanglements as we start our thinking by working from the ground up.

In Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), Quentin Skinner argued, first, that Thomas Hobbes's philosophy is best understood when placed within the context of the study of rhetoric in Early Modern England and, second, that Hobbes's attitude toward rhetoric changed in the course of his career: that he passed from a period in which he embraced civic humanism, with its emphasis on rhetoric (in the 1620s and early 1630s) to one of adamantly rejecting rhetoric in the late 1630s and 1640s, only to reembrace rhetoric in his Leviathan (1651). In his Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Timothy Raylor challenges Skinner's influential thesis, arguing for more continuity in Hobbes's attitude toward rhetoric throughout his corpus.Raylor's biographical first chapter provides evidence of the kind of scrupulous scholarship characteristic of the book as a whole. Raylor leaves no question unanswered without the most thorough effort to address it, no assumption unexamined. When Hobbes undertook the tutelage of William Cavendish, Second Earl of Devonshire, in 1608, what curriculum did he design for his charge? To find out, Raylor surveys the books purchased by the Cavendish household in the years immediately following Hobbes's hiring, records that remain at Chatsworth House, the Cavendish family estate. As a result of his painstaking review of family accounts, Raylor finds nothing terribly surprising—mostly standard collections and dictionaries were purchased—but nonetheless, now we know what works Hobbes thought essential to education: the curriculum that Hobbes, as tutor, was creating for his young charge, while not neglecting the humanities, emphasized mathematics, logic, and the modern languages (Raylor 37–38).The heart of the book is Raylor's engagement with Skinner, whose work provides the skeletal architecture for Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes. In chapters 2 and 3 on Hobbes's early work, Raylor argues, contra Skinner, that Hobbes never embraced civic humanism or the place of rhetoric in it. He finds other motives than the humanistic ones assigned by Skinner for Hobbes's translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War (1629) and for his poem De mirabilibus. That translation of a Greek or Latin work was a stage in the studia humanitatis was the basis for Skinner's claim that Hobbes was attempting to establish humanist bona fides in undertaking his translation of Thucydides (Skinner 238). Moreover, Cicero had praised history as “magistra vitae” (life's teacher) as a warrant for his translation that Hobbes sites in his prefatory “To the Reader.” Finally, Hobbes's defense of Thucydides against his critics in his introductory “Life and History of Thucydides” conforms in its organizational pattern to the prescriptions for the genus iudiciale in the Ad Herennium, with Hobbes taking the role of the defense against Thucydides's critics (Skinner 246–47). Taking issue with Skinner, Raylor emphasizes that Hobbes was likely attracted to Thucydides because his theory of history emphasized identifying the causal laws that explain events, a more scientific view of history that Bacon modeled in his History of Henry VII (Raylor 68–69). True, Hobbes may have praised history as teacher of moralisms, but that was in the preface where authors praise a subject to attract readers to its importance (Raylor 71). Hobbes's translation cannot stand as particularly humanist. In chapter 3, Raylor similarly finds in Hobbes's poem De Mirabilibus Pecci (On Marvelous Peaks) an emphasis on natural history and the influence, again, of Bacon, not an exercise in epideictic that checks off an achievement within the studia humanitatis (Raylor 105–9).Chapter 4's focus is on Hobbes's famous Briefe of Aristotle's Rhetoric (based on Theodore Goulston's Latin translation of 1619), which Hobbes published in 1637. By Skinner's reckoning the Briefe falls within Hobbes's second period, following what Leo Strauss called Hobbes's “Euclidian conversion” in a Genevan library in 1630, which resulted in his turning away from humanism and rhetoric and toward scientism (Raylor 127). Raylor notes that Hobbes scholars (J. T. Harwood and Pantelis Bassakos, as well as Skinner) “have scoured the [Briefe's] many omissions and its less frequent additions for signs of hostility to the enterprise of rhetoric, reading Hobbes's subsequent ‘rejection’ of eloquence back into it” (150). Skinner, laboring this antirhetoric thesis, maintained, for instance, that there “is nothing in Aristotle corresponding to Hobbes's contention in chapter 1 [of the Rhetoric] that judges are incapable of following scientific proofs, and that advocates are consequently obliged to take ‘the Rhetoricall, shorter way’” (Skinner 257). But Hobbes's rendering seems fair to what Aristotle writes at I.i.12.1355a: that rhetoric is useful because, while (in Freese's Loeb translation) “scientific discourse is concerned with instruction,” for the typical audience for rhetorical discourse such instruction “is impossible,” thus necessitating a rhetorical approach. Similarly, those who see in Hobbes's Briefe an antirhetoric bias point to Hobbes's translation of the first sentence in book II, chapter 1, that “‘rhetoric is that faculty, by which we understand what will serve our turn concerning any subject to win belief in the hearer.’” Skinner reads this as Hobbes's “sneering conclusion” that rhetoricians “are only interested in victory and not in truth” (257). In defense of Hobbes's neutrality, Raylor points out that in Aristotle's account of rhetoric, rhetorical discourse depends on doxa, not apodictic premises, and has persuasion, not the discovery of truth, as its end; furthermore, the claim that rhetoricians are interested only in victory is Skinner's interpolation, found in neither Aristotle nor Hobbes (Raylor 170). Raylor constantly refers to two facts about the Briefe to explain its character: it is a digest, and it was originally created as an aid for his tutoring of William Cavendish. “Streamlining” and “pedagogical value” can best explain Hobbes's rendering of Aristotle (155). If at particular points in the text Hobbes's version seems to make rhetoric more amoral than the original, it may be because Hobbes, in pursuit of economy, has combined attitudes Aristotle expressed elsewhere in summary fashion in the Rhetoric, a notoriously conflicted text.Chapter 5 is concerned with the view of rhetoric in Hobbes's Elements of Law, Natural and Positive, and in De Cive (On the Citizen), considered by Skinner as part of his middle period. Raylor maintains that Hobbes's works, early and late, reflect a basically Aristotelian view of rhetoric—rhetoric is a means to winning belief, is based on doxa (not the apodictic conclusions of demonstration), and, to be effective, must appeal to the passions of its nonexpert audience. He lines up descriptions of rhetoric and eloquence from Hobbes's Briefe of the Rhetoric, from Elements of Law, and from De Cive. On the face of it, the description in De Cive, later than the other two, seems decidedly more sophistic and lends support to Skinner's thesis that Hobbes lost respect for rhetoric in his middle period. In De Cive, the goal of rhetoric is said to be “‘to make the good and the bad … appear greater or less than they really are and to make the unjust appear just,’” that rhetoric does not begin “‘from true principles but from doxa … which are for the most part usually false’” (quoted in Raylor 178). Hobbes's description does not reflect the neutrality of Aristotle's approach. Raylor maintains that the description from De Cive is part of an argument against democratic assemblies and therefore should be taken not as a definitive for rhetoric generally but as a description of its typical deployment in this context (179). In support, he points out that later in De Cive, Hobbes identifies a second kind of eloquence that emphasizes perspicuity and elegance (182–83).Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Leviathan, addressing the question of whether here, in Hobbes's exemplary work of civil science, he makes room for rhetoric, either in theory or by his practice. Raylor points out that Skinner argued that with Leviathan Hobbes had “changed his mind about rhetoric since apparently rejecting it in the Elements of Law and De Cive, readmitting it as part of a reconstituted civil science” (246). Raylor disagrees: this conclusion depends “upon too strong a construction of what are, in context, rather more limited concessions, hedged about by restrictions” (246). On Raylor's analysis, before and in Leviathan, Hobbes is consistent: rhetoric and rhetorical thinking had no place in scientific discovery or mathematical demonstration, including a civil science that could be based on demonstration. Rhetorical invention fosters an uncritical acceptance of familiar conjectural patterns and associations and does not encourage original investigation (Raylor 220–23, 245), a criticism Bacon levied as well. Hobbes never wavered in his suspicion of rhetorical thinking. Raylor does grant that Hobbes allows a belated role for some aspects of elocutio in the presentational aspects of the genuine sciences, including civil science. While metaphor is verboten, simile, for example, is allowed not as a means of discovery or proof, but as a means for illustration (250; 262). This role for rhetoric, Raylor does concede, is more pronounced in Leviathan, but it was not, he insists, altogether absent earlier. Raylor grants too what Skinner and others also claim: a more pronounced polemical texture and tone in Leviathan, a greater presence of rhetorical figures, especially figures of abuse or ridicule, in the last two books (263–65). In these books, Hobbes acts not as the scientist but as the polemicist, denouncing what he regards as obfuscating abuses, especially of religionists.In my judgment, Raylor shows that Hobbes's take on rhetoric in the Leviathan is not, as Skinner claimed, “antithetical” (Skinner 12) to what Hobbes advanced in Elements of Law and De Cive. Hobbes's changed view is better characterized as Raylor has it—a restricted accommodation to allow rhetorical methods a limited role in the discourse of civil science. But in making political philosophers aware of the way the rhetorical culture of the early modern period shaped debates even into the seventeenth century, Skinner's was a genuine, original contribution. Perhaps we can allow innovators a degree of overstatement.The writer who noted that life in the absence of government would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan I.13) understood the way economy, climax (the figure auxesis), and wryness can make prose memorable. Hobbes clearly benefitted from a humanist education but had scarce respect for it. He had no regard for Ciceronian probabilism and would agree with Descartes that if two people hold opposing views, one or both of them is wrong. He preferred to pragmatic reasoning abstract ratiocination, a deductive method that generally “discovered” that “objective” reality was coterminous with his own thinking. Within the history of rhetoric, Hobbes is best seen as a transitional figure: the belated role he found for rhetoric anticipated what became in the Enlightenment the Campbell two-step: first convince, then persuade. For him, this formulation grudgingly allowed a role for rhetoric when dealing with imbeciles, but it hardly makes Hobbes a legitimate heir of the magnificent rhetorical culture of the early modern period.

Cicero's Pro Archia has historically been taken as a bona fide expression of humanism. In this article, I demonstrate how this reading of the Pro Archia has allowed the political and cultural tensions in the speech to remain hidden. Cicero's vision of Archias as an idealized amalgam sanitizes both the poetic and the cultural identity of his Syrian client in favour of a projection which combined generic “Greekness” with a politicized invocation of the Roman poet, Q. Ennius. Contextualizing the Pro Archia within its contemporary political moment reveals that Cicero is consciously constructing a narrative of Archias as a “good immigrant.”

The first book of medieval Latin beast epic, Ysengrimus, relates imaginary trials. In the episodes of the stolen ham and the fishing, the characters, Ysengrin and Renart, imagine that they would convene an ecclesiastic assembly, a synod, and that they would plead their case. Their plead reverses right and wrong (translatio criminis), invents speeches to denigrate each other (sermocinatio), and seems to take the form of large digressions. These speeches, which have been considered as “interminable” and “wordy” by J. Mann and É. Charbonnier, can be reassessed through classical rhetoric. This paper aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the extent of these speeches' apparent rambling, we can extricate some rhetorical structures (constitutiones) from the judicial oratory. This is the first point of a speech that also uses prolixity as an “art of being right.”

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The following commentary follows on and flows out of an initial response to reading “Multiple Voices on Authorship and Authority in Biomedical Publications” by DeTora and colleagues (2020), which appeared in volume 3 issue 4 of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. This response, by rhetorician of science, health, and medicine Celeste Condit, begins by situating questions about authorship and authority in biomedicine against a classical rhetorical source, Plato’s Gorgias. In so doing, Condit identifies a messy truth—that rhetoric potentially can pose dangers when applied to health and medicine. The authors then construct a Platonic dialogue that situates authorship, ethos, and authority in the context of biomedicine. Ultimately, the two authors illustrate the messiness that results when attempting to mount a discussion of these terms across intellectual registers.

This essay contributes to scholarship on precarity and rhetoric by exploring how participatory epideictic rhetorics, data, and infrastructure contribute to precarity. We concentrate on how shared data practices (i.e., systems for archiving, storing, distributing, and communicating information) produce and sustain human/material vulnerabilities for users, developers, and systems with observational research of VirtualLearners, a business that created, aggregated, and sold data (i.e., videos, texts, and games) to educators. We argue that VirtualLearners’s glitching online ratings system and its associated data nurtured user precarity by encouraging barriers to education, the basis of economic and social mobility. In this essay, we expose VirtualLearners’s backstage computational techniques and tactics that transformed the rhetorical capacities made available to students and teachers. As part of this study, we introduce the concept of affective data technologies to explain how publics are encouraged to become invested in data practices that can make them complicit in their own precarity.

Cicero’s Pro Archia has historically been taken as a bona fide expression of humanism. In this article, I demonstrate how this reading of the Pro Archia has allowed the political and cultural tensions in the speech to remain hidden. Cicero’s vision of Archias as an idealized amalgam sanitizes both the poetic and the cultural identity of his Syrian client in favour of a projection which combined generic “Greekness” with a politicized invocation of the Roman poet, Q. Ennius. Contextualizing the Pro Archia within its contemporary political moment reveals that Cicero is consciously constructing a narrative of Archias as a “good immigrant.”

Book Reviews 437 brush to reveal how these women's collective voices defined women's citi­ zenship in an era that suppressed it. Maddux aims to account for women's diverse practices of citizenship and civic roles at the time of the fair. This book is ultimately successful in deepening our understanding of what constitutes citizenship by accounting for multiple practices of women's citizenship. Maddux recognizes that her work can only account for a small fraction of the robust event, but her accounting is fruitful and informative. Her work certainly adds to public address and citizenship scholarship, and offers many points of departure for future study. For example, she includes a brief discussion of the interna­ tional nature of the women's congresses in the conclusion chapter, leaving the door open for others to take up her call to pay more attention to the fair from a transnational perspective. In Practical Citizenship, Maddux achieves her goal of recovering new forms of women's citizenship at the fair, which should encourage future scholarship and therefore an even greater under­ standing of women's contributions to this rich rhetorical event. Anna Dudney Deeb Brenau University Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela, eds., The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, (Mnemosyne Supplements 403), Leiden: Brill, 2017. 355 pp. ISBN: 9789004334649 This collected volume is an exciting and timely contribution to the study of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. The introduction lays out the work's premise: oratory, like theater, is always a performance involving a triangular dialogue between performer, opponent or co-actor, and audience. Influenced by the field of Performance Studies, the editors regard rhetorical texts as events rather than objects. As such, the texts can be used to recapture ele­ ments of the original performance and to reveal aspects of performance beyond oral delivery. The chapters represent a wide range of approaches to analyzing performative aspects of oratory. The majority of the chapters are on Attic oratory, with one chapter on Thucydides and five excellent chapters on Roman oratory. The following brief sketches of the contents will demon­ strate the breadth of approaches contained in this volume. The book's first section, "Speakers—Audience," contains five chapters. Ian Worthington suggests that speakers appearing before the Assembly required more skill in acting than those who spoke in the courts because deliberative speakers could be more versatile in responding to the audience and other politicians. Andreas Serafim examines Demosthenes s use of direct address, arguing that Demosthenes uses the address ta VApsc AOfjwioi in order to create a "rhetoric of community," establishing himself and the jurors 438 RHETORIC A as an in-group while excluding his opponent (31). In contrast, the address & devSpec; dixacFToci would remind the jurors that they were themselves being judged by the watching populace. Brenda Griffith-Williams claims that theat­ rical elements in Isaios 6 (the scheming hetaira, the bumbling old man) served to distract from the case's relatively flimsy evidence by building a sense of familiarity among the jurors in their capacity as theatergoers. Guy Westwood considers the dearth of examples of eidolapoeia, the impersonation of a dead person, in Classical Athenian oratory. He suggests that this practice might have been considered undemocratic, if a speaker was thought of as personally appropriating an ancestor who should belong to all. Catherine Steel demonstrates that Cicero's published speeches are misleading: in live performance, informal elements would have interrupted the speakers, requiring them to reveal their ability to successfully interact with the people and to gauge the attitude of the judges and spectators. In fact, oratory is unlike theater in that its performance is never fully scripted. The second section, "Ethopoiia," has two chapters. Christos Kremmydas demonstrates that Thucydides reveals the character and intentions of indivi­ duals and cities through dialogue—especially their style of argumentation and use of gnomic statements—as much as through narrative. Henriette van der Blom shows how Metellus Numidicus reinvented himself after being recal­ led from Africa in 107 bce. An examination of the fragments of his speeches reveals that Metellus used the "rhetoric of inclusion" to bring the people to his side while simultaneously...

Book Reviews 439 collection. Edward Harris argues that, unlike tragedy, Athenian oratory avoided the excessive expression of emotions and other histrionics because it would distract from the legal issues. Drawing on Aristotle's distinction between poetry and oratory, Harris claims that the numerous examples of emoting in the court were exceptions, rather than examples, of typical court­ room behavior. Jon Hall uses evidence from Cicero's letters and other sour­ ces to argue that judicial proceedings in the Late Republic were far more interactive and even chaotic than their modern British and American coun­ terparts. Because judges were selected publicly and were frequently wellknown politicians, they could use their service on the court to advance their own political interests. The final section, "Language and Style," also contains three chapters. Chris Carey argues that Aeschines uses a series of antitheses to cast Timarchus as feminized, depraved, and anti-democratic. He conflates Timarchus's appearance with his actions, a full-body assault that moves beyond narrative and becomes a reality seen and enacted. In contrast, Aeschines characterizes himself as metrios and a model of sophrosyne, like Solon. Konstantinos Kapparis analyzes the corpus of Apollodoros for perfor­ mance elements, arguing that Apollodoros uses vivid narrative as well as direct and indirect speech to create psychologically complex personae and to bring the action before the mind's eyes of the jurors. Finally, Alessandro Vatri uses syntax analysis to distinguish between Antiphon's forensic speeches, written for delivery, and his Tetralogies, written for publication. While the Tetralogies tend to have the more complex structures expected of a logographic text, the performed texts feature semantic ambiguities that gestures and other paralinguistic features would have clarified. Due to the broad range of topics covered in this book, more questions and ambiguities are raised than answers given. Interestingly, several chap­ ters use similar pieces of evidence to come up with opposite conclusions (Harris and Kremmydas) or to cast light on two sides of the same perfor­ mance context (Clark and Hall). While no doubt many readers will only read selections based on their research interests, the collection as a whole provides a thought-provoking roadmap of the current state of the question and indicates several intriguing avenues of future research. Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Fabio Roscalla, Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile. Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2017, 130 pp. ISBN: 9788869520457 Nel corso degli ultimi anni la categoria deWeikos e stata oggetto di un crescente, giustificato, interesse. Il recente libro di Fabio Roscalla (d ora in poi R.), che viene ad arricchire ulteriormente il dibattito relativo alYeikos, si segnala per due tratti peculiari: 1) la serrata analisi testuale dei contesti 440 RHETORICA d'occorrenza del termine; 2) il zcorto circuited che viene proposto tra due ambiti apparentemente molto distanti tra loro, e non solo per ragioni cronologiche : il tribunale attico del V e IV secolo a.C. e l'oratoria cristiana dei primi secoli della nostra era. Per anticipare le conclusioni, si pud senza dubbio affermare che le analisi proposte dall'autore permettono al lettore di farsi un'idea particolarmente approfondita dell'intricato complesso di ques­ tion! sollevato dalla nozione di eikos. Da questo punto di vista, quindi, pur rifuggendo volontariamente dall'intenzione di fornire «una nuova riconsiderazione generate delYeikos» (p. 1), esse vi contribuiscono, sia pure indirettamente , mostrando come questa nozione generate si vada articolando nella dimensione concreta e variegata dei suoi usi. Non essendo naturalmente possibile ripercorrere la minuziosa disamina testuale svolta da R., mi limitero ad evidenziare, per ciascuno dei due capitoli in cui e diviso il libro, uno tra i possibili fili conduttori in grado di rendere conto della ricchezza degli spunti che esso offre. Il primo capitolo e dedicato all'oratoria ateniese e, dopo alcune considerazioni introduttive, prende le mosse da una delle piu note orazioni lisiane, la Contro Eratostene, che ha come oggetto «un evento centrale della recente storia ateniese, su cui il dibattito doveva essere ancora aperto e acceso», cosicche «Eeikos diventa [. . .] in mancanza di testimoni diretti, lo strumento di persuasione privilegiato in possesso dell'oratore» (p. 7). E' quindi particolarmente interessante osservare che in questo contesto la nozione di eikos serve non solo ad indicare una categoria...

Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Robin Reames Robin Reames University of Illinois at Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 328–332. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robin Reames; Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 328–332. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Zottoli argued that the enthymeme theory was a very useful tool to understand Chinese texts. To show this, he analyzed and examined the Baguwen (八股文). The enthymematic features of it are compable to enthymemes of signs or enthymemes of wide-ranging opinions. They are considered to be makers of contexts that are accepted and approved largely by the audience according to common sense. They are also very similar to loci communes of Cicero.

&#8220;As we teach deliberative and engaged rhetoric, we can use this case as an exhibit for students. The revisions to the Common Rule illustrate how publicly engaged rhetoricians can negotiate the policy process and help undo decades of systematic marginalization—marginalization that has occurred as a direct result of language.&#8221;

This study investigates the role of stasis, an ancient rhetorical tool with both heuristic and analytic capabilities, in entrepreneurial rhetoric, specifically in pitching and question-and-answer sessions. Drawing from a multiyear sample of Shark Tank pitches, the author found that funders expect entrepreneurs to account for stases of being, quality, quantity, and place. The findings suggest a series of associated questions within each stasis. When these questions are answered unsuccessfully, standstills occur within the funding argument; when they are successfully addressed, the stasis passes, and ventures are more likely to receive funding. The author discusses the implications of this study for entrepreneurship and professional communication.

Drawing on Donald Schön’s concept of the reflective practitioner and the classical rhetorical concept of stasis, this article observes the habits and tactics of experienced community engaged instructors of writing and rhetoric. It suggests that a complete reflective practice, combining reflection in and on action, contributes to sustaining effective programs and practices. In moments of&hellip; Continue reading Stasis and the Reflective Practitioner: How Experienced Teacher-Scholars Sustain Community Pedagogy by Amy Rupiper Taggart and H. Brooke Hessler

Zottoli argued that the enthymeme theory was a very useful tool to understand Chinese texts. To show this, he analyzed and examined the Baguwen (八股文). The enthymematic features of it are compable to enthymemes of signs or enthymemes of wide-ranging opinions. They are considered to be makers of contexts that are accepted and approved largely by the audience according to common sense. They are also very similar to loci communes of Cicero.

328 RHETORICA de cinq siecles qui separe le pseudo-Platon et Maxime). L'ouvrage hesite, puisqu'il mentionne incidemment ces auteurs platoniciens, tout comme il hesite, pour les besoins de son objet, entre un traitement exclusivement philosophique et une approche plus rhetorique de la priere. On forme evidemment ces regrets parce que Ton y est conduit par l'aptitude d'AT a produire des syntheses eclairantes. Sans doute Porphyre et ses predecesseurs platoniciens n'avaient-ils pas lu Lacan, mais ils n'en tenaient pas moins lame pour structuree, consciemment et inconsciemment, comme un langage. Qu'elle ne soit pas exprimee en paroles, phonetiquement, ne change rien au fait qu'elle est foncierement logike (meme si elle se fait sans le truchement du logos, y compris du logos interieur, empreint de passion ; p. 158), qu'elle est de l'ordre du discours et que la pensee est toujours, depuis Platon, un discours, sinon un dialogue. AT nous invite a distinguer de maniere tranchee la priere silencieuse et phi­ losophique de la priere prononcee. Mais sans doute doit-on temperer cette opposition. La priere silencieuse en quoi consiste l'exercice theoretique de l'intellection, est une forme de communication, de partage et d'entente avec la divinite. C'est ce qui explique, pour n'en retenir qu'un exemple, que les demons soient designes par Porphyre comme des divinites intermediaries, des « transporters » de messages, qui font circuler prieres humaines ou pre­ scriptions divines en les transmettant d'un destinataire a l'autre. Comme le dit le debut de la longue sequence demonologique du De Abstinentia, en II 36 (§3), c'est la mission proprement angelique des demons que de transmettre des messages et des conseils. Parmi lesquels figurent les prieres. Le silence n'est aucunement suspension de l'expression et de la communication entre les hommes et les dieux. L'ouvrage d'AT connaitra la meme fortune que sa precedente synthese« demonologique », en devenant l'etude de reference sur son objet. Jean-Francois Pradeau Universite Lyon III - Jean Moulin Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621 James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Scholarship on rhetoric in Plato habitually suffers from certain limita­ tions. While recent decades have seen profound revolutions in how Plato's dialogues are read and interpreted (inspiring profound changes in Plato Book Reviews 329 scholarship generally), these changes have had too little impact on how Plato's treatment of sophistry and rhetoric is conceived. Among the most important of these changes is the development of literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues, which consider the works' philosophical content by relation to their literary form as dialogues. According to this view, reading Plato entails an awareness of dialogue's distinctive capacity for masking authorial intention and voice. Such a reading resists the hasty assumption that the works put forth Plato's dogmatic or doctrinal positions for which Socrates was the presumed mouthpiece. Rather, as literary-dramatic representations, the dialogues give voice to indirect positions and hidden views. In spite of this enhanced sensitivity to Plato's authorial choices, there has been on the whole no significant alteration to the view that Plato held rhetoric in contempt or extreme distrust, believing it to be a sham art, a threat to true philosophy, and an inferior method to dialectic. Hence rhetoric is mere rhetoric—the lesser counterpart of philosophy, useful only for speaking to ignorant masses, for whom more rational methods are ineffectual. He may have offered marginal and grudging allowance for rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue, but only as an unrealizable ideal that sacrifices practical effectiveness. This leads to the second limitation. Studies of rhetoric in Plato often orbit around the two dialogues where rhetoric is treated most explicitly— the Gorgias and the Phaedrus—and neglect the relevance of many of Plato's other dialogues for understanding his conception of rhetoric, despite the fact that language, rhetoric, and sophistry are abiding (albeit implicit) concerns across the corpus of dialogues. Where these...

Long: I do have a quarrel with what McCloskey's chapter says about Plato's Gorgias, one of my favorite Platonic dialogues.One of the aims of that dialogue is to distinguish between two modes of speech -one that aims at truth and one that aims at power.Plato identifies the former with philosophy and the latter with rhetoric, thus drawing McCloskey's ire because she is a longtime defender of the importance of rhetoric.McCloskey: Yes, Plato is charming, and Gorgias most of all.But we must not, I am sure you agree, love his eloquence so much that we fall for his authoritarian tastes, the tastes of an aristocrat hostile to democracy.I do defend rhetoric, and long have.My reasons are two: (1) It is the basis of a free society, as its inventors in Sicily understood, and, as the essay argues, (2) There is no "dialectic" that can yield Truth, capital T, only an honest rhetorical discourse getting agreed truth for the nonce.Both of these reasons are assaulted by Plato, everywhere in the writings we have.Roderick Tracy Long: But in her critique of Gorgias she says that Plato is defending a state-imposed standard of truth.I don't see that in Gorgias at all.Maybe

ABSTRACT This article approaches the problem of post-truth and the opposition between philosophical dialectics and sophistic rhetoric. The antagonism is addressed through a reading of Žižek's depiction of the ongoing discussion between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, the “new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists,” as stained by sexual difference, and the dialectics between Parmenides and Gorgias. The article argues that only through acknowledging the inescapable failure of these sides to ever establish a complete totality are we capable of overcoming the antagonism that resides at their core, thus making a dialectical sophistics, on the basis of Žižek's thought, possible. Thus, only by taking the path through post-truth can we attempt to reach the disavowed core of truth that haunts every failed system.

Book Reviews 227 compelling theoretically, the case study did not fully examine the implications of the project's reliance on homonormativity. Bessette concludes with two provocations for the future of queer retroactivism. First, she argues that a near-future task may be to challenge the centrality of corporations in digital media production. And second, she follows Carla Freccero in noting that the hauntological past must be heard, on its own terms. Bessette's work with a variety of grassroots lesbian archives is an engaging read and offers a useful approach to historical scholarship. But I felt that she did not spend enough time parsing out the affordances and limitations of grassroots archives in relation to their institutional counterparts. Fittingly, Bessette's most important insight is her notion of retroactivism, a concept that can hopefully open up more space for reconsidering archival identification, queer or otherwise, into the future. Morgan DiCesare University of Iowa Peter A. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 The close connections between rhetorical and theatrical performance as two of the major types of civic spectacle in Classical Athens are well esta­ blished, but we are hampered by the fact that our knowledge of courtroom practice is largely dependent on the surviving texts of the speeches. Unlike their Roman counterparts, the surviving fourth-century Greek treatises have little to say about delivery or about the type of spectacular effects alluded to in Attic comedy and in the speeches themselves, which creates a challenge to the modem researcher. Peter O'Connell's book, based on his PhD disser­ tation, is one of several recent studies to take up that challenge1 and is dis­ tinguished by its focus on sight and visual effects in Athenian trials. O'Connell's book stands out for its focus on the role of vision, both physical and mental, and metaphors of sight in forensic oratory (with a brief foray into the funeral oration). It makes an important contribution to the study of vivid language and visual effects as an integral part of the process of persuasion and underlines the continuing importance of these tools through modem comparisons. The author's solution to the lack of theoretical discussions contemporary with the speeches is to draw principally on an impressively wide range of ancient speeches, giving close readings of ^ee, for example, N. Villaceque, Spectateurs de Paroles: Deliberation democratique et theatre a Athenes a Vepoque classique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) and A. Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (London : Routledge, 2017). 228 RHETORICA selected passages (summaries of all the speeches discussed are given in an invaluable appendix). The astute close readings of these passages are supple­ mented by appeals - made with all due caution — to the critical and theoreti­ cal discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result sheds a new light on the functioning of judicial oratory as a multi-sensory persuasive per­ formance, though the nature of the material inevitably raises some questions. All the major passages are quoted in the Greek and in the author's own English versions. The choice of a very literal translation style serves to clarify the sense of the words discussed but at the occasional cost of fluidity. The first of the book's three parts asks what was visible to the jury within the courtroom, analysing passages that comment on the impact of the presence and physical appearance of the various parties to the case in the courtroom and of material evidence. Against the background of the close association of vision and knowledge in the Greek language, the second section analyses the importance of vision and of metaphors of vision in Athenian law, forensic oratory, and, beyond the courts, in classical Greek philosophical and medical texts. It is here that O'Connell, through citations from Sophists such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Gorgias, raises the vital epis­ temological question of how juries could decide upon events they had not themselves witnessed. This is backed up by an illuminating analysis of the lan­ guage of visibility in Antiphon and in Gorgias' Defense of Palamedes, which explores the challenge of proving the non-existence...

Book Reviews 229 O'Connell is very effective when analysing the use of vivid language to make the audience imagine scenes they have not witnessed themselves, dis­ cussing Aeschines' passage on the sack of Thebes, Demosthenes on Phokis, and Lycurgus on the scene at Athens after the catastrophic military defeat at Chaeronea. His analyses make use of both ancient criticism and modem lit­ erary tools. Taken together, they make a strong case for accepting the ancient commentators' evaluation of these passages as able to make the audience "see" the scene in imagination. The most stimulating part of this final section however is the final chapter on "shared spectatorship" with its examples of the interaction between the mental images of past actions or absent persons created by the orators' language and the actual sights of the courtroom. O'Connell shows how the orators encourage a type of mental superimposition (my term) of the idea of the sight evoked - and created - by the orator onto the accused present in the courtroom. This is particularly satisfying as an example of actual and virtual sights being used as a sustained strategy throughout a speech and underlines the multiple possibilities for manipulation. One area that could have been addressed in more detail is the sugges­ tion on p. 32 that appearance—real or imagined—might spark a process of enthymematic reasoning (the accused has the commonly accepted characte­ ristics of a murderer/adulterer therefore it is likely that he is guilty as char­ ged). But this rich and stimulating study has a great deal to offer specialists in ancient and modem rhetoric and in ancient Greek literature and culture. Ruth Webb Universite de Lille Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Plato's Menexenus is a rhetorical masterpiece. That, at any rate, seems to have been the judgment of generations of Athenians, who, Cicero tells us, had someone recite Socrates' funeral oration annually (Orator 151). The speech can be stirring, especially when Socrates speaks in the voice of the dead soldiers and urges their sons to lives of virtue. But is it sincere? Before he delivers the speech, Socrates claims that it is easy to give funeral orations, since all you have to do is praise Athenians to Athenians. The speech misrepresents historical events and doesn't even reflect Socrates own sentiments, since he attributes it to Pericles mistress Aspasia. To make matters worse, Socrates seems to be delivering the speech years after he, and probably Aspasia as well, had died. The puzzles of the Menexenus have no easy answer. Unable to resolve its contradictions in a satisfactory t47av, scholars have tended to focus on its relationship with other surviving 230 RHETORICA Athenian funeral orations and with the rest of Plato's works. This thoughtprovoking volume is no exception. The contributors approach the text from the perspectives of philosophy and political thought, but their argu­ ments will also be inspiring to readers interested in rhetoric in Plato and in Classical Athens. After a brief introduction, Speechesfor the Dead reprints Charles H. Kahn's 1963 article, "Plato's Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus" Kahn argues that the Menexenus is a political pamphlet, expressing Plato's dislike of the policies of Pericles and his successors, especially the capitulation to Persia in the King's Peace of 386. The eight new essays in Speeches for the Dead are influenced not so much by Kahn's specific arguments as by his approach, which poses five questions about the Menexenus: Why Aspasia? Why the anachronisms? Why the historical distortions? Why did Plato write a funeral oration? Why did that oration continue to be delivered years after it was written? Only some of the authors invoke these questions directly, but a fundamental "why" lies behind each of the essays. They all seek to explain why the Menexenus is the way it is by treating it as a work of serious Platonic philosophy. In "Reading the Menexenus Intertextually," Mark Zelcer takes seriously Socrates' claim that Aspasia composed the speech he delivers by gluing together pieces she had left...