Women's rhetoric in the Middle Ages reflects their participation in the deliberative rhetorical genre inherited from classical antiquity. The deliberative tradition, which was often theorized by medieval rhetoricians as existing in consular practice, can thus serve as an example of women's rhetoric which, as Christine Mason Sutherland has noted, could take place in sermo. Women's letters were often hortatory, civic, and sometimes agonistic in tone. These rhetorical artifacts demonstrate that women operated in the rhetorical tradition as eloquent, powerful agents of persuasion in the civic arena, and they also show that, although unmoored from traditional spaces and practices associated with deliberation in antiquity, deliberative rhetoric was a more viable form of rhetoric in the Middle Ages than previously believed.

Life can be frustrating. For others, not for me. I am thinking of “others” faced with me, the rhetor(ician). Let me explain this: so far I have lived my rhetor(ician)'s life by observing others getting caught in a state of “admiration.” Whenever I reply to the unthinking question “And what do you do?” with “I am a professor of rhetoric,” I wait for the reaction, I smile inwardly, sometimes pour myself a drink, and watch “admiration” enfold. Descartes: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul that makes it focus its attention on objects that seem rare and out of the ordinary” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxx, my translation). When, adding insult to injury, my interlocutor tries to get things back on an ordinary track and persists, asking “I see [do you?], you mean [no, I don't] like [bad start for a definition] ‘communication’ [here, substitute a string of annoying approximations, as you please]?,” I don't loosen the snare but rather tighten the noose: “No, rhetoric, just as the word says.” And I see how frustrating life can be for those who think and believe they know what rhetoric is—including that peculiar brand of unconfessed pedants: English teachers. I am at my worst, of course, when I am asked, “In French?” (they assume I teach elocution at a charm school).Indeed for Descartes “admiration” is one of the six architectonic passions. So, I make it my philosophical duty not to let my interlocutors off the hook on which they have snagged themselves. I should let go, I know, but I won't. I want to exploit the kairos. The energy of “admiration” literally lies in “surprise” (and materially in Cartesian physiology); that is how the soul is “caught” unawares, forcing it to reset itself and its atoms, if it can. That energy (see how relentless Descartes is) is made of two components: novelty and forcefulness (“insofar as the impulse it triggers is powerful right from the start”). In sum: admiration has a knock-out effect, like a tennis backhand coming from nowhere and applied with full power right on contact, never mind the follow-through and all those courtly frills. So, after a while I let the victims go, yet not without providing them, for the road, with one striking example of “rhetoric” applied to current news, so that no doubt be left in their mind that they are not dealing with something they can reduce to what they think they know but with something actually “admirable,” in sum “novel” and “powerful.” Life need not be frustrating.For some time now I have been testing publicly the impact of this uncompromising proselytizing, and I have learned a great deal about perceptions of rhetoric among an educated public, which in France we call the “honest public” (the assumption being that uneducated folks are dishonest by mistake, while educated ones should know better). I write a regular column for a leading French online, public intellectual magazine, Les influences (www.lesinfluences.fr). My blog is called Le rhéteur cosmopolite (The Cosmopolitan Rhetor). During the recent French elections, Le nouvel observateur plus asked for my collaboration—which caused some stupor among readers but created somewhat of a fleeting sensation. I call a spade a spade. I am a rhetor and I am cosmopolitan. I refuse to take a leaf from Stanley Fish's acribic blog in the New York Times, The Opinionator: I do rhetoric, not opinion. I am still hoping the Onion will run a spoof of Fish and call it “The Onionator.” Professor Fish is very smart indeed at peeling off onion layers of opinions, until what is usually left are the bitter tears of his contrite liberalism defeated by illiberal public arguments. In my own blog I never let my political opinions color my analysis: I also peel onions, but I do not expect anything in return (except fans, like a mysterious “Corinne,” who followed me from my previous blog on Mediapart, Les oies du Capitol [The Capitoline Geese], to Les influences when I got contracted). My own opinions are private; they are long-standing prejudices that have hardly changed since I reached the age of reason, and they are unlikely ever to alter. Like ancient, imperious Gods they command me when I cast my ballot or get involved in politics. Otherwise I keep them in check. It makes for uneasiness, but that is the destiny of those who keep Sextus Empiricus on their bedroom pedestal. A commentator, on another site, chastised me on account of my “pessimism.”Be that as it may, “Le rhéteur cosmopolite” led to a book (Paroles de Leaders, [2011]) and then to another (De l'art de séduire l'électeur indécis [2012]), as I watched the word “rhétorique” pass through phases of public “admiration” and become implanted, as it were, in current parlance. I say “current” because here again Descartes is right on the money when he describes who is more likely to be struck by admiration: “In any event, although the intellectually challenged are not by nature inclined toward admiration, it does not follow that clever people are always prone to it, unlike those who in general have enough common sense but not a very high opinion of their own capacities” (Les passions de l'âme, 2:lxxvii, my translation).Descartes, having lived in Holland where weighing gold was akin to weighing thoughts to the smallest ounce, offers a fine observation of life and of public life. The last part of his definition is, in my view, a rather neat description of commentators on social networks and, to be frank, the rank and file of journalists. So, I have been observing how professional media persons or social media interjectors “admire” rhetoric, how they awake out of the opiate slumber of “information” and confess “admiration.”It all began early in 2010 when Sciences humaines, a respected monthly mainly read by the teacherly professions, ran a two-page-long eulogy of my Hyperpolitique (2009) titled “Un grand discours vaut mieux qu'une petite phrase”; it carried a catchy center-page insert that read “Rhetoric was a Jesuits' diabolical invention of persuasion.” An advance copy of the article (richly illustrated by orators at full throttle in the old Third Republic chambers) triggered commentary on prime-time radio (France-Inter [“Revue de presse,” 26 Jan. 2010]) by an anchor who dedicated his program to “political talk.” He addressed three ideas that he claimed came out of my book: that in Britain public speaking is a like a tennis match, that in the United States it is “soft and hypocritical” (!), and that in France it is a “theaterocracy.” My telephone started to ring. Everyone listens to that program: it gives the chattering classes something to sound smart about, for a day. I hardly recognized the arguments of the first chapter of Hyperpolitique but was keen to see how the journalist (who attended a top school and is a philosophy major) managed to summarize it against the grain of public opinion: Gallic stereotypes are that British are underhanded, Americans pugnacious, and the French clear thinking. Clearly, my argument about rhetorical cultures, however bent by him to create controversy, had led him to revise his opinions about universals of public speaking in democratic cultures (oddly, he left out what I wrote about the German rhetorical world).Then something unexpected happened, as the press awoke from its information-induced opiate sleep—management journals and financial magazines began taking an interest in my book. Le nouvel économiste (25 Mar. 2010), a leading, salmon-pulped, financial weekly, interviewed me and ran an article titled “Le goût de l'éloquence” misspelling “rhétorique” as “réthorique” (as did the French C-Span, LCP, in a ticker during a broadcast in which I was invited to comment on the Socialist Party's primaries). It gained momentum. “Rhetoric” was being adopted by business people who, had they read analyses in Hyperpolitique about the “delirium” of “labor talk” and the rhetoric of trust or contract management, may have realized I was on their case and not on their side. It was my turn to be struck with “admiration.”What made the surprise all the more novel and forceful was the fact Le nouvel économiste article, uniformly laudatory and actually well written (except for the displaced “h,” but copy editors are no longer what they used to be), appeared in its “Leadership and Management” section and placed the emphasis on “eloquence” in its title. It highlighted three key points or catchphrases set in inserts that, read in sequence, produced the following syllogism: rhetoric teaches that social life is a transaction of arguments, transaction is good, and thus rhetoric should be taught at school. I was stunned by the boldness of the enthymeme. Soon after, a professional newsletter for senior staff at state agencies, hailed “rhetoric” as a new tool for labor relations (“Rhétorique à la rescousse,” Lettre du cadre territorial, 1 June 2010). Rhetoric had reentered public awareness where I did not expect it, in that very audience who, we are so often told, controls and understands “the real world”: the world of finance, of demand and supply, of accumulation of capital and return on investment. Yet, not under the guise of rhetoric as such but still draped in the quaint nobility of “eloquence.” Striking such a pose is rather typical, I often find, of the conservative dowdiness of financiers who entertain obsolescent images of high culture, even when they collect cows dipped in formaldehyde solution—to them “eloquence” spoke of artful elevation and of cultural capital.The grafting of “rhetoric” onto public idiom was taking and, to size up the change over the years, I simply needed to look back at what Les Échos, France's main daily financial paper, read by stock-exchange people, had written back in 2006 (in its supplement “Les enjeux,” Apr. 2006). A columnist had asked a rhetorical question, “How does a HR manager tell workers they are being laid off?” Her answer was a laundry-list of self-help tips in public address, appended with a substantial list of secondary reading—a motley of manuals, ancient and modern, among them my Art de parler (2003). However, my book is not a manual of persuasive writing. It is nothing like the unrivaled Hodges' Harbrace Handbook (2009). It is not even a primer for public address—both are the sort of books French elite professionals, trained in grandes écoles, dislike and distrust and despise and abandon to the college-educated crowd. L'art de parler is a historical anthology of rare and, to the noninitiate, complex manuals of rhetoric. “Eloquence” does fit in Les Échos' readers' idea of high culture and social codes of distinction, but it is actually an unpractical notion if the purpose is sweet-talking workers unions. As Les Échos declared Art de parler “illuminating,” I wondered, “Of what?” Not of “rhetoric” for the word “rhetoric,” let alone the concept, was absent in that self-help article. I got an answer after the publication, that same year, of my Mahomet (a history of narrative topoi about the founder of Islam): two leading Arab philosophers, Malek Chebel and Abdelwahab Meddeb (author of The Malady of Islam), reviewed it who acknowledged its belletristic and cultural value but stopped hesitatingly at the doors of the ivory tower, as it were—Meddeb just hinted at the possible, hermeneutic value of “rhetoric” in public affairs (in this case, the debate about Islam in France). Later on he and I had a lively public exchange. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it became clear to me that it all evinced a desire and a lack, that is, a lack of knowledge as to what the lack actually is or was.By the time in mid-2011 that my blog had become a regular feature, its essays were being taken up by other online magazines (often lifted without even my knowing, always a good sign), and invitations to contribute elsewhere had become routine. Paroles de Leaders was out. Mentions in the press acknowledged “admiration,” spoke now of “rhetoric” in curious, somewhat inquisitive tones—gone was pejoration. They responded to the novelty and force of the surprise in two ways.On the one hand, notably feminist or women writers wrote of “manipulation,” describing me as “cantankerous” and as “filling [my] fountain pen with Pastis” (Le Monde, 18 Aug. 2011) or (in an otherwise level-headed and well-intentioned interview) as a master at explaining “wondrous jugglery” (Terrafemina, 14 Oct. 2011): they played out stereotypes commonplace in some feminist circles that men exert persuasive power through hectoring or dazzling display or self-inebriation of speaking, while women's rhetoric is irenic and conversational and coactive (see my Gender Rhetoric [2009] for contrasting views on the subject). On the other hand, leading magazines mostly read by the financial professions spoke of “rhetoric” as a novel, surprising, forceful, and desirable management tool (which, I guess, would reinforce the just-mentioned stereotype). Here is a florilegium: for Les Échos (7 Oct. 2011) Paroles de Leaders is “ruffling and lifts the veil on the mystery of leadership”; in L'express (16 Nov. 2011) the star column “Tendançologie” (“Trendology”) hailed this new approach on “how to become a leader.” The September 2011 L'expansion Management Review, a quarterly of reference only sold by subscription, judged the book “indispensable.” The lesson easily drawn, with hindsight, from these punchy reviews is clear: the medias and their audiences no longer shunned the word and the idea of rhetoric and gave rhetoric, properly spelled, a prime spot. I asked the marketing department at one of my publishers (Bourin) if they had a hand in it. “No, the financial press just likes what you write; it is new, and they see its usefulness.” Descartes was possibly correct in judging who is more prone to “admiration.” I have taken part in a number of national television and radio broadcasts in which the word “rhétorique” was cast about generously, like aspersions at mass, yet not without an ever-so-slight hesitation, the sort one has when tasting a new dish, and I even discerned a twinkle of daring in the eye of the show host. It amuses me always to see the word rising on the horizon and popping up, not in derision or pejoration but as an intellectual evidence, a lack-filler.If I have retraced this short history, a surrogate confession of information opium eaters and their discovery of rhetoric as a management and public affairs (ephemeral) panacea, the reason is not vanity. Rather, it has to do with identifying our place in the lack, with how, as rhetor(ician)s, we interact with public affairs, how we are placed.The bracketed “-ician” is an indication of our unstable place, of an instability that should be, for us, a matter to ponder. Say “rhetor” and one risks confusion with “orator”—the risk is that popular perceptions will infer from the denomination itself our purported ability to persuade, as if specialists of rhetoric ought to be better shod than when it to our public And the same perceptions will also in of being and smart to be if it that, we are persuasive in of public say and it in a that is, as professional as the French it The will but we will be at to explain what we actually Here is an it has to me over and over again when a to a that I have to tell the at that I am not a professor at the and rhetoric is not a I get a as if I were to something about my On another getting a at my I had this in is as it on my and what I had never a what rhetoric, think came a smile of followed by this from the I and I was not as I had just a on the rhetoric of on at and was my thoughts on rhetoric as the de The “-ician” because it to a and in a as in de a has two main to create a of and to is what the and the were me, me. I am a be that as it rhetoric is not a it is a and a that the as it is the lesson at the very of the lesson of the and the rhetoric is but in need of and (a is to in a by in the of under the “Rhetoric or a and Rhetoric Rhetoric is also a to the world as because it is the of the fact that is as I to call it. may explain management is so in for all its on that are and in to if not the is usually to explain this which one have possibly are indeed they were would be and and would not to those who to that are or as they are of it, in the of is to In my I to rhetorical idiom to in public affairs, a I also to show that on the of rhetorical can be I do so without any for the of I where the lack is at the word and the of to that which one has without its idea by in his as a key notion for is no I in or our idiom to to that is to what be of to The public out of “admiration,” some of our idiom and some of it. The of course, is to see our idiom to what in an culture like the French this is than in a culture where self-help is over The risk however is to be in public as who may become to and commentators on I believe that, to being eaters of our own we ought to size up the value of the to the and to attention to the of life.

Reviewed are: The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives, Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt, editors, The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide, 3rd edition, Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Winifred Bryan Horner, editors, Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson, editors, The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process, Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, Becoming a Writing Researcher, Ann Blakeslee and Cathy Fleischer

ABSTRACT This article considers the emergence of methodological patterns, or “sanctioned narratives,” within feminist rhetorical historiography, arguing that with just a few exceptions these patterns have anchored our work to conceptions of the woman-as-rhetor exercising deliberate, strategic agency against her world, rather than within it. While this conception has been enormously productive in redefining what “counts” in the history of rhetoric, it also constrains our attempts to pursue broader methodological projects that take as their subject the interworkings of rhetoric, power, and gender. After describing the ways that existing methodological patterns have become entrenched, this article offers one method for shifting our commitments, a feminist-materialist methodology. Influenced by theories of posthuman agency and by actor-network theory, this method can help feminist rhetoricians pursue broader conceptions of rhetoric that will allow us to intervene more effectively in the rhetorical production and transformation of gender relations and power dynamics.

ABSTRACT Over the past three decades, feminist scholars have collectively produced a coherent and substantial body of research and established feminist rhetoric as a discipline. This article argues for linking feminist rhetoric with comparative rhetoric so as to open up conversations about theories, methodologies, and processes between the two fields. Examining a hybrid feminist discourse through early-twentieth-century Chinese women's texts, the author suggests that we rethink feminist rhetoric and historiography from a cross-cultural perspective and that Chinese women's rhetorical practices—negotiating cultural flux in contact zones—can be used as a model for current feminist scholarship. As the discipline moves toward a new dialogic paradigm, such a cross-cultural frame can help us examine our assumptions, reconsider our priorities, and discover and develop multiple local terms and concepts in reading texts across various historical periods and social, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries.

This article addresses two central research questions: (1) Are there possible detrimental implications to teaching multimodal composition in first-year composition? (2) If so, what is pedagogy’s role in mediating these outcomes? Guided by these questions and focused on the responses of eighty seven first-year composition students, a mixed-methods research approach is engaged through surveys, pre/post-semester questionnaire data, transcribed interviews, and writing-about-writing essays. Uncovering the 39.6% of students who—through this research—are discovered to feel constrained rather than liberated by technology and who believe that technology amplifies their place in the literacy hierarchy, this article articulates the identity politics inside the multimodal composition classroom and introduces the term “hypermediated fractures” into the pedagogical conversations surrounding feminist pedagogy and the teaching of digital literacies in first-year composition.

In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl Glenn (re)introduced the art of silence, and in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, Krista Ratcliffe (re)introduced the art of listen...

By understanding the verbal and nonverbal manifestations of autism as a rhetorical imperative “a perspective that involves applying Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening” scholars can do much to dissolve the idea of otherness that appears in discussions of this topic.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

Abstract The following essay delineates an “evangelical rhetoric of rage” used by antebellum female moral reformers in their campaign against licentiousness. Highlighting their assertion of moral authority, their use of scripture to justify actions, their confrontational tone, their candid, unapologetic discussions of sexual immorality, and their creation of a public forum for women, this essay claims that female moral reformers represent an important turning point in women's rhetoric. While moral reform has garnered less attention than abolition or temperance, female moral reformers forged an early feminist consciousness and employed methods and messages women reformers would use throughout the nineteenth century. Notes 1In 1839 the New York Female Moral Reform Society changed its name to American Female Moral Reform Society to better reflect the national reach of the organization. Throughout this article I refer this organization as the FMRS. 2I thank Rhetoric Review peer reviewers C. Jan Swearingen and Nan Johnson for their valuable suggestions. 3Although auxiliary societies were concentrated in New York, Boston, and New England, they extended west as far as Michigan and south as far as Alabama (Whitetaker 124).

At many levels of the educational system, teachers use Sojourner Truth's speech “Ain't I a Woman” as a powerful example of women's rhetoric. This article examines the politics of privileging one version of the speech. The author makes a call to teachers to teach multiple versions and talk about the politics of transcription, gender, and race.

Abstract While traditional rhetoric missed opportunities for potent change in the New World, alternative rhetorical theory nonetheless existed. This essay argues that a play by renowned nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a source of protofeminist, New World rhetoric, prompted by multicultural seventeenth-century New Spain. Immensely respected by the dominant powers of Church and state, Sor Juana was also attuned to issues of nondominance because she was criolla and female. Her religiously orthodox Divine Narcissus is simultaneously a rhetoric of listening that rewrites classical rhetoric's focus on speaking within a community to attend to people at odds with one another. It highlights the need for Spaniards, criollas, and Mesoamericans to go beyond talking at one another, and instead listen with care. The Divine Narcissus is an important text in rhetorical theory, concerned with dominant and nondominant rhetors and audiences in early Mexican society. Notes 1See Merrim and Kirkpatrick on the echo; Stroud's Lacanian reading; Gonzalez, Granger-Carrasco, and Kirk on theology; and Merrim on narcissism. Like me, Ackerman emphasizes the theme of utterance and hearing voices, but stresses this as a means of encouraging an "interpretive devotion to Christ" (73). 2Work on rhetoric and listening is now being explored by rhetoricians such as Royster, Krista Ratcliffe (see "Cassandra," Rhetorical Listening), Michelle Ballif, and Gemma Fiumara. Wayne Booth is one of the few scholars to posit listening as an overlooked but traditional part of rhetoric. See also Cynthia Selfe's recent argument for composition studies to reclaim "aurality," "the reception and production of aural communications" (646, note 1). 3Naming indigenous groups is a fraught endeavor. Current scholarly practice favors using an ethnic group's name for itself when feasible; the specific group Sor Juana refers to here are the Mexica. I use Nahua (of which Mexica are a prominent subgroup) to refer to a wider group of Nahuatl speakers and their religious practices, and I use Mesoamerican as a general term for indigenous peoples of central Mexico and environs. While sensitive to the history of associating native with pejoratives like primitive, I use native as a neutral term for connoting indigenous inhabitants. 4For example, Flower suggests that in composition studies we teach students how to "speak up" and "speak against" but not "how to speak with others" (2). Her rhetoric of public engagement aims for intercultural dialogue in urban settings, often through "hybrid discourse" or nontraditional delivery (32). Ratcliffe investigates rhetorical listening as "a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in cross-cultural exchanges" (Rhetorical Listening 1). Glenn examines how nondominant groups use silence, "as a rhetoric, a constellation of symbolic strategies" (xi). 5As an auto sacramental, The Divine Narcissus is a one-act play with a prefatory loa. While both are divided into scenes, the numbering of lines is consecutive throughout each respective unit, so my citations specify loa or auto and the line number only. This and subsequent citations from The Divine Narcissus (hereafter abbreviated DN in parenthetical citations) are from the first and only full English translation of the play, by Patricia Peters and Renée Domeier, now out of print. 6For poems in which Mesoamericans speak Nahuatl and Blacks speak their own dialect of Spanish and an African language, see Obras completas 2.14 (translated into English in Trueblood 125), 26, 39, 71, 94, and 138. Sor Juana's use of Nahuatl in these poems reflects a concern for native speakers that is also a rhetorical device, making parishioners feel the Church was also theirs. 7See Pratt's discussion of Guaman Poma's letter ("Arts"). 8Méndez Plancarte, one of the two twentieth-century editors of Sor Juana's collected works, argues against the possibility that this auto was used to explain doctrine or that it had a missionary goal of educating indigenous groups (Juana, OC 3.511). 9 Auto sacramental is a generic designation for a religious play that is often allegorical, and which typically during this period honored the Eucharist (Granger-Carrasco Ch. 1). 10Between 1691 and 1725, The Divine Narcissus was published in Spain several times in collections of Sor Juana's works. It was not reprinted again until 1924, in Mexico. 11Echo plays the part of "Angelic nature, fallen from grace." 12New Spain's literary scene was determined by Spain, where Narcissus was a "ubiquitous" literary presence from the fifteenth century on (Méndez Plancarte in Juana, OC 3.514). Both Méndez Plancarte and Paz aver that Sor Juana's play is not only different from but also far superior to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's play (Juana, OC 3.lxxiv; Paz 351). 14 Yo iré también, que me inclina la piedad a llegar (antes que tu furor lo embista) a convidarlos, de paz, a que mi culto reciban. I offer my own translation because Peters's and Domeier's is quite off the mark: "And I, in peace, will also go/(before your fury lays them low)/for justice must with mercy kiss;/I shall invite them to arise/from superstitious depths to faith." Sor Juana's Spanish is more generous. There is no mention of "superstitious depths"; both Nahua and Spanish religious practices are referred to as cultos (forms of worship; cf. Loa 95, 178). 13My reading contrasts with Gerard Flynn's: "All in all, her attitude towards the Conquest seems neutral. She shows no recrimination for Zeal, and yet the pagan Occident and America are not ugly…. Sor Juana assents to both that which is Spanish and that which is Indian. The Conquest happened, and she accepts it" (74). 15Octavio Paz views Sor Juana's works as crucial to the early formation of criollo identity. It is only recently, though, that Sor Juana's works have been classified as literature of Mexico, not Spain (Granger-Carrasco 15). 16A similar multiplicity of identity is what Gloria Anzaldúa capitalizes on in her twentieth-century rhetorical theory for Mexican Americans. 17The Requerimiento demands allegiance to the Church as supreme ruler, but also tells Mesoamericans that Spaniards "shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our holy Catholic faith" (Washburn 308). 18It is this aspect of language that Moraña attributes to Sor Juana, claiming that her "rhetoric of silence" (the capacity for words to persuade beyond their overt reference) is affiliated with the sublime (176). 19Sor Juana seems to be conflating rituals that apply to two different Nahua gods, Huitzilopochtli (god of the seeds) and Quetzalcoatl (to whom human sacrifices were made) (Sabat de Rivers 290–291). 20The incident is quite possibly apocryphal, and at the very least, sculpted to resonate with the stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria and the young Jesus in Luke 2:46–47. 21"An attitude of complete receptivity, of openness to 'any view or hypothesis that a participant seriously wants to advance,' still puts a woman, I believe, in a dangerous stance," Susan Jarratt cautions, quoting Peter Elbow (117). 22"Why is the Devil a woman?," Merrim asks of the play, and reconciles the dilemma by finding parallels between Satan and Sor Juana, who must also dissimilate because divine authorities restrict her voice (114). 23In Spanish, the last line cited here (line 1300) reads, "Suene tu voz a mi oído": "Make your voice sound within my hearing." Sor Juana is playing upon verse 2.14 of the Song of Songs: "Let thy voice sound in my ears" (Douay-Rheims version). The English translation given by Peters and Domeier does not change the meaning, and the use of pour manages to allude to the fountain into which Narcissus gazes. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJulie A. Bokser Julie A. Bokser is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University, 802 W. Belden, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.

In this article, we undertake three critical tasks: First, we delineate major shifts in feminist rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape of the field. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted, so have standards of excellence. To articulate excellence in feminist rhetorical studies, we draw attention to interconnections among three critical terms of engagement: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation. Third, we propose an enhanced inquiry model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical work in rhetoric and writing studies.

Identifying the specific complexities and historical context of post-Mao Chinese literary women’s rhetoric, along with ways they have been misread, the author argues in general that Western feminist critics need to be cautious about applying their concepts to non-Western women’s literature.

Examining two particular texts and applying modifications of Western feminist concepts, the author argues that early twentieth-century Chinese women’s writing contains feminist thoughts and textual strategies far more complex and nuanced than conventional wisdom has led us to expect.

This article looks closely at some of the lingering stereotypes that Composition Studies holds toward Web surfing and queries the resulting literacy hierarchy against our students’ reading and writing practices that take place online. This article claims that while good progress has been made in the way of revising twenty-first century definitions of (digital) composing, the academy has yet to fully revisit its boundaries of legitimacy surrounding (digital) reading. Additionally, this article contests the academy’s use of technology vis-à-vis email, Blackboard, or blogging as a placating attempt to integrate technology into the classroom without genuinely validating our students’ dominant literacies or their digital lives. This article leans on the theories of feminist composition pedagogy as it calls for the field to decenter its authority and revise curricula to incorporate critical digital literacies.

While feminist scholars consider bodies, dress, and space central to inquiry into gendered rhetorics, we lack methodologies that situate these factors—and the additional factor of time—in an integrated system. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “acts of institution” can help feminist rhetoricians to construct richer accounts of the gendering of the female body. The example of rhetorics surrounding women factory workers in World War II America demonstrates how rhetorical practices produce gender differences through embodied, spatiotemporal rhetorics. In this case wartime adjustments did not bring about long-term changes because they relied on a fundamental antithesis between men and women.

Abstract Lu Yin (1899–1935), a modern Chinese writer, employed a variety of vernacular genres to explore women's living conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. With her vision of nüquanzhuyi (feminism) and her conceptualization of writing, Lu Yin modeled herself as a feminist rhetorician and employed redefinition and diary/epistolary fiction as major rhetorical strategies to challenge the sexist assumptions in the prevailing patriarchal discourses and to empower Chinese women. This study further calls for a more flexible and sensitive approach to studying women's rhetorics from different cultures. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Mary Garrett and Xing (Lucy) Lu for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to CSU–Fresno for its support of this project with a Grant for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities. 2On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing demonstrated against the Chinese government's humiliating policy toward Japan. There resulted a series of strikes and associated events amounting to a social and intellectual revolution. These events were soon dubbed by the students the May Fourth Movement, which acquired a broader meaning in later years. 3See Chinese Department at Jinan University, Zhongguo lidai shige mingpian shangxi. 180–83. 4Unless noted otherwise the passages quoted from the original texts are my translation. 5Lu Yin was well versed in classical Chinese; her view of writing was inevitably influenced by the ancient Chinese philosophers in terms of cosmology and epistemology. This sense of a unity with the whole of society and of the world comes from the Neo-Confucian tradition—the great learning paradigm grounded in the cosmological assumption of a unity of heaven and man—which claims that the outer world may be ordered by first cultivating the inherent goodness within the individual mind. 6Since the late Qing period, Chinese intellectuals and writers had engaged in the Baihua (Vernacular) Movement in which they translated various kinds of Western philosophical and literary works, experimented with new words, sentence structures, vernacular genres, and other baihua rhetorical devices to create a new culture. See Edward Gunn's Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose. 7Lu Xun's short fiction "Diary of a Mad Man" was published in New Youth in May 1918. Ding Ling published "Diary of Miss Sophia" in Fiction Monthly in 1928.

Abstract Popular eighteenth-century British biographies of Cicero had a significant impact on the rhetorical identity formation of Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800). As the acknowledged founder of the “Bluestocking” salon, Elizabeth Montagu played a key role in forming the conversational and epistolary eloquence of her broad and influential network of men and women. A careful analysis of the young Elizabeth's epistolary discussion of biographies of Cicero and Atticus, especially Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero, provides insight into Montagu's mature rhetorical practice as well as neo-Ciceronian influences on men's and women's rhetorical identity formation in eighteenth-century Britain.

This special issue on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism challenges the disciplinary defining of rhetoric and composition around U.S.-centric narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship. Such defining has tended to focus on feminist and women’s rhetorics only within the borders of the United States or Western Europe. The result is, potentially, the reproduction of institutional hierarchies. Transnationality refers to movements of people, goods, and ideas across national borders and, like the term borderland, it is often used to highlight forms of cultural hybridity and intertextuality. To bring a transnational focus to our field will require new methodologies and critical comparativist perspectives, which in turn may shift our objects and areas of study.

Despite the important work emerging from both the global and digital turns in rhetoric and composition studies, one key area has yet to be examined: the central role that the circulation of digital texts plays in the transformation and appropriation of feminist discourse. This article proposes a new methodology for analyzing the processes through which the modes of global circulation of digital representations become rhetorical and, ultimately, political actions. Feminist rhetorical studies must extend its analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority.

Links among the World Bank’s gender-mainstreaming policies and recent U.S. welfare policies demonstrate how transnationalism enables international gendered logics to become national (and international) norms. The metaphor of the network helps feminist rhetoricians expose how transnational linkages shape domestic and international policies by articulating the complex relationships among gendered logics, power, and occasion.

This article asserts the viability of key topoi in feminist historiography: first, to establish presence for everyday women rhetors, and second, to explore ramifications of their positioning within variant historical narratives. Catalina Hernández was one of six European women recruited to Christianize indigenous girls immediately following the military conquest of Mexico. Her letter to the civic judicial council seeking autonomy for her community of women teachers was perceived as sufficiently dangerous to warrant its deletion from the historical record and the subsequent “disappearance” of the writer herself; only excerpted accounts of Catalina's writing remain. I seek the historical Catalina Hernández in the sophistic mode, assaying four motives and four contexts for the production and reception of her letter.

Reviewed are Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, by Krista Ratcliffe.

Book Review| August 01 2007 Book Review: Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series, by Lindal Buchanan Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series by Lindal Buchanan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. 202 pp. Rhetorica (2007) 25 (3): 332–334. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2007.25.3.332 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 Book Review: Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series, by Lindal Buchanan. Rhetorica 1 August 2007; 25 (3): 332–334. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2007.25.3.332 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. © The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

332 RHETORICA Darstellung der Entwicklung des Genres Stâdtebeschreibung bzw. Stâdtelob von der Antike bis in Guicciardinis Zeit. Guicciardinis im Titel der Arbeit genanntes Werk (Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, 1567) wird nicht besprochen; wichtigstes Ergebnis für die Forschung zu dieser Schrift dürfte eine gegen Ende gemachte Feststellung des Autors sein: "No feature which one meets within Guicciardini's Descrittione seems to be without precedent." (S.355, Anm.69) Ein hilfreiches Register (S. 356-373) und ein Nachweis der Erstpublikationen der Beitrâge (S.374) beschliefien den Band. Wer ihn zur Gànze oder auch nur in Ausschnitten liest, wird dem Autor Bewunderung für die Breite seiner Interessen, seine Kenntnis der Primàr- und Sekundàrliteratur und die Detailgenauigkeit seiner Analysen nicht versagen. Dabei kônnte man sich auf Melanchthon berufen, welcher in seiner Rhetorik in einem Abschnitt über das Kommentieren sagt: "[...] qui eo est vel usu vel ingenio, ut in auctoribus videre possit, quur hoc loco, quur sic singula tractentur, ilium vehementer probandum censeo." Auch diese Passage ist Classens Analyse natürlich nicht entgangen (vgl. S.264). Johannes Gôbel Universitat Tubingen Lindal Buchanan, Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Ante­ bellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. 202 pp. With the publication of Lindal Buchanan's Regendering Delivery, South­ ern Illinois University Press's Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series has become the national leader in book-length studies of gender and rhetorical performance. While only the seventh in the series, Regendering Delivery is the fourth to deal with this subject (the others are Nan Johnson's Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, Carol Mattingly's Appropriate [ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America, and Roxanne Mountford's The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces'). Building on these works, Buchanan adds to our understanding of antebellum women's opportunities and strategies for speaking in public, par­ ticularly in three areas: elocutionary instruction for girls in public schools, public speaking occasions for young women in private colleges, and delivery styles of antebellum women activists. A central claim of Regendering Delivery is that throughout history, Amer­ ican women have had far greater access to elocutionary instruction than has been commonly thought. In Chapter 1, "Readers and Rhetors: School­ girls' Formal Elocutionary Instruction," Buchanan offers evidence that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, girls as well as boys were taught elocu­ tion as part of their reading curriculum. Eighteenth-centurv readers such as Reviews 333 Noah Webster s popular American Selection ofLessons in Rending and Speaking included elocutionary instruction (both actio and pronuntiatio) and sample debates and declamations for practice. Textbooks acknowledged schoolgirls as an audience (e.g., through instructions on conduct), making clear that reading and elocution were first thought to be gender-neutral subjects. As Buchanan s analysis shows, it was not until the nineteenth century that sep­ arate readers for girls and hoys were published, with selections from oratory omitted in some hooks for girls. Nevertheless, pronuntiatio continued to be taught, and girls participated in school-sponsored exhibitions in which they spoke before audiences, as Buchanan richly illustrates in Chapter 2. Chapter 2, "Practicing Delivery: Young Ladies on the Academic Plat­ form, ' offers a decisive response to Robert J. Connors's controversial claim that co-education was responsible for the demise of oratory in nineteenthcentury colleges and universities. Buchanan agrees with Connors that there were some changes to the curriculum in the nineteenth century, but disagrees with the reasons Connors offers. Young women spoke before public audi­ ences at school-sponsored events for fifty years prior to 1830, and throughout the nineteenth century women admitted to co-educational institutions such as Oberlin fought for the opportunity to speak in public, sometimes form­ ing their own clubs to practice in private. Weaving together a history from biographies of such famous Oberlin graduates as the Reverend Antoinette Brown, Buchanan establishes that co-education provided women hard won opportunities to develop their oratorical skills, which they later exploited in the fight for women's rights. Chapter 2 includes many interesting glimpses into the compromises forced upon college...

This article attempts to analyze the ineffable quality of ethos in a case study anout Frances Willard, contending that she succeeded with conservative middle-class audiences by invoking the ethos of the Methodist woman preacher, which she may have learned from her mentor Phoebe Palmer. Methodism encouraged women's moral activism, and Palmer, foreshadowing Willard's agenda, worked for many causes, all the while maintaining a genteel True-Womanly persona. Willard testified to Palmer's spiritual influence on her, and her speaking style also reflected Palmer's blend of intense commitment, spiritual restraint, refined appearance, sound logic, and seemingly artless eloquence. Both women's rhetoric came to seem dated in their final years, yet both left lasting legacies of social change in their communities.

Abstract This study offers scholars in composition and communication studies an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between feminists and rhetoric in the context of edited collections. The author first recasts recovery and gender critique as inventive arts for editors, and then analyzes a selection of edited collections' framing texts to demonstrate how editors compose their collections by mediating these arts. This work reveals that an early either/or relationship between the arts of recovery and gender critique gives way to a both/and approach that opens possibilities for multiple, rich avenues of inquiry in feminist rhetorical studies.

This essay examines the rhetorical practices of Charlotte Forten and Ann Plato, freeborn African-American women of the Antebellum North. I argue that their highly literate texts contribute to the history of women's rhetoric on at least two counts. They engage the major theoretical and philosophical influences of nineteenth-century rhetoric in America, in particular George Campbell's Principle of Sympathy. These women's writings also attest to the gulf between rhetoric and reality in a "democratizing" culture that fails to address the issue of race.

Reviews 403 faith not only to sustain the congregation but also to encourage it to confront social injustice and work for racial uplift. Collectively, these women's spatial and rhetorical strategies point to an alternative method for crafting effective ethos and promoting Christian community. The epilogue addresses whether or not the "populist" preaching prac­ tices employed by O'Connor, Hill, and Moore are "feminine" ones. While acknowledging that a number of male church leaders (including Henry Ward Beecher, post-Vatican II priests, and African American preachers) have used similar methods, Mountford argues that women's abandonment of the pul­ pit, disclosure of the personal, and efforts to level hierarchy represent a significant "ritual transgression of sacred space" and tradition (156). In other words, women preachers choose alternative discursive methods and de­ livery styles in order to create ethos in a place and position traditionally antithetical to them. The Gendered Pulpit represents an important step toward understanding how gender affects discourse and rhetorical performance. Mountford con­ cludes by inviting other feminist rhetoricians into the new theoretical home afforded by a refigured fifth canon of delivery, and she encourages them to build upon her foundation and undertake further studies of women min­ isters in sacred spaces. Mountford's fine work makes a convincing case for the fifth canon as a promising site for investigating gender and rhetoric and, ultimately, for making the entire discipline inclusive and comprehensive. Lindal Buchanan Kettering University Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer, eds., Rhetor­ ical Education in America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 245 pp. This volume reconsiders contemporary rhetorical education from the perspective of the history of rhetoric. The editors provide a helpful intro­ duction (Glenn) and afterword (Lyday and Sharer). Many of the essays were plenary presentations at a Penn State Rhetoric Conference organized by the editors. The volume's most successful essays link a study of how rhetoric was historically taught with how it might be taught today. In "Lest We Go the Way of the Classics: Toward a Rhetorical Future for English Departments," Thomas P. Miller reviews the history of composition teaching as a history of crises of literacy, and suggests that we now need a curriculum that will move us from the traditional interpretive stance of the critical observer to the rhetorical stance of the practical agent involved in negotiation. Shirley Wilson Logan, in "'To Get an Education and Teach My People': Rhetoric for Social Change," examines the self-help schooling of nineteenth-century African 404 RHETORICA Americans for clues to help today's disenfranchised communities. Logan calls for "consilience," that is, a linking of knowledge across disciplines, and a rhetorical education that concentrates as much on critiquing and evalu­ ating contemporary discourses as on producing writing. With meticulous scholarship, in "Parlor Rhetoric and the Performance of Gender in Postbellum America," Nan Johnson reveals the conservative réinscription of gender roles in the potentially liberating growth of manuals for parlor rhetoric after the Civil War. Gregory Clark reminds us of the range of American rhetorics in his examination of the national park as a public experience establishing a shared sense of national collectivity, a training ground for citizens who need to respond to public conflict with transcendence. Essays by William Denman and by Sherry Booth and Susan Frisbie are not as strong. Denman argues that rhetoric lost its civic purpose during the nineteenth-century expansion that attempted to keep out the vulgar and the foreign by policing the borders of oral and written communication, but he ignores the growth in specialized textbooks and conduct-book rhetoric that offered rhetorical education to working class and female students. Booth and Frisbie argue that metaphor should be central to rhetorical education and analyze their qualified success in teaching metaphor to their students, but they mistakenly suggest that Aristotle did not find metaphor important to rhetoric and their claim that Renaissance rhetoric emphasized style not content has been significantly revised in recent scholarship. Other essays offer perceptive variations on the collection's theme of the history of rhetoric as a guide to future teaching. Susan Kates links James Raines's revision of the history of English to include respect for Appalachian English...

This essay attempts to demonstrate how transgender theories can inspire pedagogical methods that complement feminist compositionist pedagogical approaches to understanding the narration of gender as a social construct. By examining sample student writing generated by a prompt inspired by transgender theories, the author’s analysis suggests how trans theories might usefully expand and extend—for both instructors and students—our analysis of the stories we tell personally, socially, and politically about gender. Ultimately, the author argues that trans theories and pedagogical activities built on them can enhance our understanding of gender performance by prompting us to consider gender as a material and embodied reality.

This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.

Abstract “Survival Stories” examines the Chicana sterilization abuse case Madrigal v. Quilligan by taking up four historiographic approaches— three are recognized in feminist rhetorical scholarship; the fourth offers a methodological strategy to the field. Through this process, this essay makes several contributions to rhetorical study. It presents an example of Chicana feminist rhetoric and an inroad to this rhetorical tradition. It contextualizes the arguments made by the women in Madrigal v. Quilligan and exposes the strategies used by the judge to dismiss their claims. Finally, this essay proposes a historiographic practice that presses the limits of the rhetorical situation and investigates how these Chicanas’ rhetorics survived.

Abstract The Lady's Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women's rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women's and men's rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook's uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women's informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”

Focusing on the rhetorical work of definition in the writings of Maria Rentería, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Astrea, contributors in the early years of the twentieth century to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica, this essay argues that these writers redefined who the Mexican woman was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. Its exploration of their definitional claims historicizes Chicana feminist rhetoric, and examines how their work infuses rhetorics of/from color with concerns of gender and class.

n 1910 and 1911, Maria Renteria, Sara Estela Ramirez, and Astrea3 redefined who the woman4 was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. As contributors to La Crdnica, a Spanish-language newspaper based in Laredo, Texas, these three women called their female readers to refuse essentialist definitions that described women as second-class, subservient, and apolitical.5 The writings of Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea stood in contrast to such constructions as they inscribed women as intelligent and honorable-as women who could, and indeed should, engage in and change the world around them. Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea wrote to shift old and shape new definitions, but even as they shared this goal, each writer composed a different Mexican woman for her readers. Astrea persuaded her readers to reassess their education and their place outside the home in her two articles To the Woman Who

Abstract In the nineteenth century, traditional paradigms for rhetoric became increasingly outmoded as industry, technology, and cultural disruptions reshaped printing practices, and rates of literacy improved, problematizing classical rhetorical and writing practices. Victorian rhetoric became fragmented as control of and access to print to disseminate attitudes and ideas became less centralized among an educated male elite. Thomas De Quincey and Margaret Oliphant illustrate ways that rhetoric was theorized and practiced in the Victorian periodical press as the terms of authorship, gender, and culture fluctuated.

312 RHETORICA for Hume than for his moderate opponents. In his response, consistent with Common Sense philosophy, Campbell argues that the contest is not between two types of experience because our belief in testimony is prior to experience: we naturally accept witnesses' accounts in the absence of evidence that they are deceived or deceiving. As a philosophical point, Campbell's argument deserves the respect it has received. The problem is that Campbell does not consistently advance this view. As Suderman points out, Campbell dismissed Roman Catholic accounts of contemporary miracles—a blatant example, but hardly the only one, of Campbell's sacrificing philosophical consistency to defend his religious positions. I would argue for something closer to the reverse of Suderman's thesis. Campbell was an accomplished scholar, but he took as his mission defending and spreading the Word. As a thinker, he is most interesting when he feels most free of his mission. This explains why his relatively secular Philosophy of Rhetoric—a coherent synthesis of classical rhetoric with eighteenth-century empiricism—is his best and most important work, the one on which is reputation quite properly rests. My dissent does not, however, lessen my respect and gratitude for Sud­ erman's book. Suderman's exhaustive archival research and his intelligent reading of Campbell's works make Orthodoxy and Enlightenment a must read for scholars interested in Campbell. Arthur E. Walzer University ofMinnesota Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Com­ posing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. xi + 279 pages. Imagining Rhetoric is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Amer­ ican rhetorics. Truly a first, this book provides the only full-length study of early American women's rhetorical education and composition practices. In attempting to "glimpse how composition came to be situated in the lives of the women in the new nation," Eldred and Mortensen achieve two im­ portant tasks: they draw upon a wide range of sources, some rhetorical and pedagogical, others fictional and personal; and they resist a seamless or heroic interpretation of women's use of neoclassical civic rhetoric, al­ lowing instead for the discontinuities and disappointments that accompany liberatory struggles and revisionist historiography. This study focuses on six women, some well known, others more ob­ scure, but all grappled to make liberatory civic rhetoric their own: Han­ nah Webster Foster, Judith Sargent Murray, Mrs. A. J. Graves, Louisa Car­ oline Tuthill, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Charlotte Forten. Eldred and Mortensen recover an array of these women's "schooling fictions" from the Reviews 313 1790s to the 1860s, including female textbooks, anthologies, theoretical texts, practical writing guides, and syllabi, as well as novels, novellas, diaries, political essays, and reflective narratives. The authors demonstrate that ex­ panding the scope of sources of women's rhetoric is crucial to revising history, and in this particular case they effectively challenge the standard thesis of neoclassical rhetoric's decline. Just as "schooling fictions" imagine the roles of writing in women's post-Revolutionarv lives, Imagining Rhetoric compels readers to contemplate the possibilities of historiography. The introduction outlines the primary argument that liberatory strains of neoclassical civic rhetoric were "indispensable" to these women's visions of female education. The first chapter also raises the book's central question: were these women's uses of this rhetoric liberatory? The following chapters do not answer this question directly but illustrate the complexity of the issue and maintain a productive tension between possible responses. Chapter two discusses how female textbooks and didactic novels, both appearing after the Revolution, conceive of women's education quite differently. Whereas Donald Fraser's schoolbook, The Mental Flower-Garden, dresses up a restric­ tive and superficial education for women in liberatory garb, Foster's The Boarding School imagines an ideal education that teaches women to use liber­ atory rhetoric themselves to shape the new nation. Yet for Murray, the subject of the next chapter, a vision like Foster's is complicated by fears of sophistry, nonstandard English, and poor teachers. To temper the seductive aspects of misguided liberatory rhetoric, Murray develops a classically oriented "com­ monplace rhetoric," a system of instruction based on literary borrowings, which Eldred and Mortensen...

Abstract An intricate network of collaborative relationships surrounded and supported nineteenth‐century American women's public discourse. Antebellum women worked closely with families, friends, and hired help to create and deliver rhetoric, negotiate conflicting private and public obligations, accommodate gender norms, and construct “feminine”; ethos. However, despite collaboration's central importance to women's rhetoric, scholars currently lack a model that accounts fully for its many forms and multiple functions. This article introduces a new model of collaboration capable of explaining how and why this cooperative method offers marginalized groups their most effective means to the public forum in resistant surroundings.

This article employs neoclassic and feminist rhetorical perspectives to investigate the persuasive strategies in two scientific articles written in the late nineteenth century by Ellen Swallow Richards. One of the first credentialed female scientists in the United States, Richards wrote about nutrition research she conducted in her experimental food laboratory, the New England Kitchen, to persuade two separate audiences—one predominantly male and the other predominantly female—of the scientific value of nutrition studies. The article adds complexity to our historical underpinnings by querying how gender—of the writer, of the audiences, and in the nature of the topic—contributed to the writer’s rhetorical burdens and provides evidence that women historically have been active knowers and users of science and technology.

Spoken and Written Discourse: A Multi‐disciplinary Perspective by Khosrow Jahandarie. Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Publishing Company, 1999. 446 pp. Mattingly's “Telling Evidence”;: Re‐Seeing Nineteenth‐Century Women's Rhetorics Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader edited by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 292 + xii. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth‐Century America by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uniersity Press, 2002. 175 + xv. Seeking the Words of Women: Two Recent Anthologies Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology edited by Jane Donawerth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 337 + xlii pp. Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s) edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 521 + xxxi pp.

Abstract The first noticeable thing about almost any situation of conflict is how soon conversation breaks down and the proverbial ‘other means ‘take the fore. This study explores how Jane Addams, a prominent Chicago mediator, crafted new rhetorical openings for conflict resolution. The bloody Pullman Strike of 1894 was a landmark event in Addams’ rhetorical career, since it was during this strike that she learned to negotiate the rhetorical space between labor and management, as well as learning how to enlist the public in the work of reconstructing severed human relationships. Using the lenses of invitational rhetoric and fantasy theme analysis, I show how Addams attempted to create a more conciliatory mode of speech for seemingly intractable situations.

Abstract After the thousands of years in which a masculine canon of rhetoric has been constructed, feminist scholars have recently worked to create a more inclusive tradition. While problems and concerns have arisen with regard to this change, my work with nineteenth‐century primary texts has convinced me that more time to explore extant texts can alleviate many of the apprehensions associated with this new research. Further time to recover, evaluate, and make meaning from additional information will allow for a more complete picture of women's rhetorical history. In addition, a greater breadth of knowledge will allow us not only to add figures to a more inclusive tradition, but to redefine what counts as evidence in evaluating rhetoric and rhetoricians. In this way we may create a more complete, honest, and interesting picture of the rhetorical tradition.

Abstract This essay emends Foss, Foss, and Griffin's invitational rhetoric to strenghten its philosophical undergirdings and release it from unfounded criticism. Standpoint hermeneutical rhetoric is the framework offered to position the theory more solidly in the canon. Three strategic moves include discovering and revising its epistemological stance to reflect Lorraine Code's concepts of knowing others and second personhood; connecting Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to rhetoric; and using Gadamer's emphasis on position and historicity to develop the connection to feminist standpoint theory. Conclusions point toward the implications of invitational rhetoric as dialogue linked to practical application in public communication and pedagogy.