Abstract The July 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States was heralded by many as the best possible chance of avoiding both a nuclear armed Iran and another war in the Middle East. Although success is far from certain, the path to the deal was even less so. That the Obama administration achieved a verifiable suspension of Iran’s enrichment activity in November 2013 was itself a major success. What is even more remarkable is that the Obama administration was able to do so while utilizing the same mix of policy tools, diplomacy, and pressure as the George W. Bush administration. The difference in outcomes is especially confusing given the tendency of foreign policy experts to hold that President Obama’s and President Bush’s foreign policy worldviews are relatively identical. I argue that a rhetorical perspective provides the answer. Specifically, President Obama responded to the challenge of Iran’s nuclear program by fashioning a frame of responsibility in a comic register, shifting the obligation to resolve the standoff peacefully onto both Iran and the United States. A crucial aspect of this rhetorical strategy was that it presented the Iranian regime with the option of rejoining the global community (albeit on restricted terms). Thus, Obama presented a hybrid of Kenneth Burke’s tragic and comic frames that chastised the Iranian regime for dangerous behavior while acknowledging American guilt, error, and responsibility for bringing the nuclear standoff to a peaceful end.

ABSTRACT This article gives an account of the nature and purpose of Kant's poetic rhetoric in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. I argue that Kant employs a poetic mode of rhetoric in order to provoke a passionate, enthusiastic response in his audience. I go on to show that Kant became increasingly skeptical of poetic rhetoric's pathetic power after publishing Dreams. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Kant's confrontation with the Sturm und Drang led him to formulate a moral critique of poetic rhetoric and its tendency to undermine its audience's rational autonomy. I conclude by highlighting the significance of this critique in and for the development of Kant's mature rhetorical theory.

ABSTRACTWith the publication in 2002 of Martin Heidegger's summer semester 1924 lectures, “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy,” a major new star appeared in the constellation that is twentieth-century rhetoric. Since then, a growing secondary literature has emerged. This article organizes that literature as a series of specifications closing in on Heidegger's critical conception of rhetoric as potentially a hermeneutic of the everydayness of being with others, and it claims that our understanding of this everydayness will remain flat or partial until we situate the concept in the sequence of Heidegger's thought in the 1920s. If we work through pre-1924, 1924, and post-1924 periods, it becomes clear that there are religious, modal, and sophistic contexts for Heidegger's evolving conceptualization of everydayness. The concept of everydayness that emerges is disheveled but rich. The article concludes by suggesting that only faint echoes of these potent rhetorical trajectories can be discerned in the late Heidegger.

ABSTRACT This article examines the meaning of the subjective in rhetorical modes of inquiry in contrast to the other-oriented nature of social critique. I reopen the problem of consciousness for interpretation by examining challenges to scientific authority in the 1930s, specifically how Kenneth Burke and Alfred North Whitehead respond to a “crisis in mathematics” born out of Whitehead's attempt, with Bertrand Russell, to reconcile logic and mathematics. Whitehead uses Russell's paradox to demonstrate the necessary return of subjective inquiry as a legitimate mode of knowledge. Burke's Permanence and Change develops Whitehead's arguments to justify interpretative approaches to knowledge. Examining their arguments reveals an analogous “crisis in the humanities” in which language or culture is substituted for the examination of subjectivity. Such misplaced concreteness risks omitting interpretive aspects of rhetorical inquiry in favor of the social or political when such social aspects only emerge within the field of subjective experience.

The author proposes a concept of ethics for the writing course, one derived from a moral theory that is both old and new and one that engages us when we teach such practices as making claims, providing evidence, and choosing metaphors in corollary discussions of honesty, accountability, generosity, intellectual courage, and other qualities. These and similar qualities are what Aristotle called “virtues,” and they are the subject of that branch of moral philosophy known as “virtue ethics” today. While the word virtue may sound strange to us today, Duffy argues that the tradition of the virtues has much to offer teachers and students and can clarify what it means, in an ethical sense, to be a “good writer” in a skeptical, postmodern moment.

An instructional note on foregrounding rhetoric across the curriculum to convey the rigor of professional and technical writing and assist instructors in claiming pedagogical ethos in a course that spans many disciplines.

Book Review| December 01 2016 Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along. By Gregory Clark. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. 208. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper. Raymond Blanton Raymond Blanton Creighton University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (4): 712–715. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.4.0712 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Raymond Blanton; Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2016; 19 (4): 712–715. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.4.0712 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

AbstractThis paper explores the role of examples (paradeigmata) as propaedeutic to philosophical inquiry, in light of a methodological digression in Plato's Statesman. Consistent with scholarship on Aristotle's view of example, scholars of Plato's work have privileged the logic of examples over their rhetorical appeal. Following a small but significant trend in recent rhetorical scholarship that emphasizes the affective nature of examples, this article assesses the psychagogic potential of paradeigmata, following the discussion of example in Plato's Statesman. I argue that by creating an expectation in the learner that he or she will find similarities, the use of examples in philosophical pedagogy engages his or her desire to discern the intelligible principles that ground experiential knowledge. Thus, examples not only serve as practice at the dialectician's method of abstraction but also cultivate a dialectical ēthos, characterized by the desire to know the logoi of all things.

Abstract In the decades after the Civil War, countless Americans saw the bloody conflict as some kind of message from God. These perceptions created a problem for the preeminent Republican orator of the day, Robert Ingersoll, who was also a fierce opponent of revealed religion. In speaking for the Republican Party during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, Ingersoll managed to interact successfully with religiously structured memories of the war while maintaining his reputation as the Great Agnostic. This essay explores how he was able to do so. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s work on the rhetoric of religion, I argue that Ingersoll interacted with Civil War memory by redirecting supernatural terms to natural and sociopolitical contexts. In so doing he imbued political culture with a sacred character that allowed believers, nonbelievers, and people of various persuasions to participate in memories of the war. In the end, Ingersoll’s oratory modeled a “pluralistic civil religion,” which employs religious language for civic ends but eschews references to the divine as a way of accommodating a range of beliefs.

Last October I bought a ticket to hear the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. I went because I wanted to hear what democracy sounded like. Or, more accurately, I went to hear wh...

AbstractThe earliest record of the term “kommōtikē,” commonly translated as “cosmetics” or “self-adornment,” occurs in the “most famous passage” of Plato's dialogue Gorgias (Kennedy 1994, 37). There, Socrates compares rhetoric to cookery and sophistry to “kommōtikē” (464b–66a). This marks a decisive moment in the Platonic corpus, a moment when rhetoric and sophistry are associated with seeming and appearance and therefore distanced from being and reality. I outline the reasons why this translation is incomplete if not misleading. I propose an adjustment that pulls both the analogy and the dialogue away from a Platonist distinction between seeming and being and toward a distinction between foreign profligacy and domestic austerity. This transformation discharges the vulgarization of appearance as mere appearance and mere seeming that has long infected and hampered both our understanding of Plato's thought and of early rhetoric.

Abstract“Morality is relative to culture” is a descriptive claim, but in practice its normative entailment is rarely embraced. It is often claimed that this poses a problem of consistency for relativism as a morally normative theory: either relativists do not act in accordance with their beliefs or they hold different beliefs from what they espouse. This article evaluates a debate between Paul Boghossian and Stanley Fish over relativism, analyzing their arguments on the relationship between theory and practice in ethics and the tenability of moral relativism. I defend two claims: that the truth or falsity of moral relativism has significant bearing on action and that morality is based on a conjunctivity of doxastic and practical discursive commitments. Establishing the conjunctive commitment argument, I make the case that the doxastic and the practical lie at the heart of normative reasoning in general and ethics in particular and discuss the implications of such a view for rhetorical theory and community.

“Using what he calls the “Caribbean Carnivalseque” as a rhetorical trope that defines the essence of being Caribbean, Browne grounds his analysis in Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives and the concept of human beings as symbol-using animals.”

Aristotle’s science writing serves as an instance of a classical science writer at work. Applying his theory of writing found in his Rhetoric, Poetics, Posterior Analytics, and Categories treatises to his History of Animals illustrates his work as a writer of life science. As rhetorical tools, his theory of tropes and figures and his theory of the model as developed in his theory of definitions and the enthymeme work as epistemic strategies. The essay concludes that further study should examine other rhetorical dimensions of his science writing.

ABSTRACTGerald Early's remark that black people are seminally important to the modern world because they created the blues is examined as a contribution to the politics of recognition that deviates from the liberal model that dominates in political theory. Central to this deviation is the politics of honor and Paul Corcoran's distinction between formal and aesthetic recognition. The politics of aesthetic recognition is examined here through Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutics in Truth and Method as well as through Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and philosophy of Dasein (being-there), inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, and his writings on art. The significance of art and specifically of the blues to the politics of recognition goes beyond the representation or the relaying of others' voices, in that it calls forth modes of being-there over against difference.

The authors provide a robust framework for using rhetorical foundations to teach multimodality in technical communication, describing a pedagogical approach wherein students consider the rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory—when developing texts beyond print. Students learn to assess their own work, reflecting on how each canon contributed to the rhetorical effectiveness of their multimodal projects. The authors argue for using the canons as a rhetorical foundation for helping students understand technical communication in the digital age.

Abstract This essay examines an early alternative to polling, Mass-Observation (M-O), that dramatically reported on the nuances, contradictions, and passions of public opinion during some of the most extraordinary times in British history. Between the Abdication Crisis of 1937 and the start of World War II, M-O’s combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, along with its emphasis on the cultural context of public opinion, produced a richer, more textured, and more deliberative rhetoric of public opinion than the Gallup poll’s survey techniques. In the process, M-O foreshadowed many of today’s scholarly trends, including the reflexive turn in social research, increased skepticism about the knowledge claims of science, and the emergence of more public scholarship.

There has been a remarkable surge of interest in creativity in a wide variety of disciplines in recent years. Taken in aggregate, this body of work now theorizes creativity as a—foundational aspect of human cognition and intelligence. If we theorize creativity as a highly sophisticated and valuable form of cognition, it must also then be regarded as a necessary—and indispensable part of the curriculum in the writing classroom.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

Abstract President Ronald Reagan’s June 6, 1984, “Address on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day” is one of his most celebrated speeches, and yet no critical assessment of the address exists in rhetorical scholarship. In this article, I examine this speech as a deictic epideictic address, or a speech in which the rhetor uses the physical place, the immediate scene/setting, and the assembled audience as evidence to commemorate the past and chart a clear course for the future. Through this analysis, I argue that Reagan’s speech at Pointe du Hoc is exemplary because it relies on rhetorical vision and deixis to connect a past moment to the present, and in so doing, invites the audience to participate in the discourse emotionally, mentally, and even physically. I conclude by suggesting that a deictic approach to rhetorical criticism offers scholars a vocabulary to describe how speakers can “point” or refer to the physical and material elements of a speech setting as evidence for their argument.

ABSTRACTRalph Waldo Emerson's theory of rhetoric has been the subject of ongoing inquiry that has moved Emerson further and further outside a line of Platonic thinkers in order to make his discussion of rhetoric applicable to contemporary discussions about civic discourse and the public sphere. Such accounts, however, subtly undermine the complexity of Emerson's attempts to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy. Understanding Emerson as involved in a project to not only democratize language and rhetorical theory but also Plato, the representative of truth seeking and idealism, clarifies precisely how Emerson understands the power of rhetoric and philosophy to shape and enact democracy. Emerson was trying to find a place for Platonic idealism in the shaping of a young country, and in doing so, he reconfigured what might seem today to be irreconcilable dualities. For Emerson the split between the spiritual and the material world does not implicitly prioritize one domain over the other. Instead, Emerson negotiates the terrain between the worlds and suggests ultimately that language and action are means of straddling them and realizing real change in society. If ideals are in some way external in Emerson's metaphysics, they are no less accessible by every person who attends to his or her own experience in the world. Rhetoric, for Emerson, brings those poles together.

ABSTRACTThe problem St. Augustine confronts in the Confessions is fundamentally one of rhetoric: God should be singularly desirable, yet rhetoric seems necessary to motivate our pursuit of him. Religion participates in the relative marketplace of rhetoric, where ideals need to be authorized because they lack a self-sufficient rationale. In his early encounters with Cicero and the Platonists, Augustine struggles to renounce all such partial ideals in order to pursue philosophical truth unequivocally. Yet the refusal of rhetoric is, paradoxically, another willed ideal authorized by its own rhetoric. Augustine ultimately escapes rhetoric in the conversion scene by demonstrating his inescapable subjection to it; in doing so, he surrenders his will in such a way as to permit God's grace to operate through him. His conversion ultimately results from this inverted humiliation, which forces Augustine to abdicate his ascetic efforts and pretensions.

ABSTRACT Between the publication of Montaigne's Essais (1588–1595) and Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) rhetors became increasingly anxious about arguing in utramque partem. Paradiastolic discourse, fundamental to Montaigne's early essays, is anxiously though expertly deployed in Leviathan. Paradiastole fuses the ability to see and speak about an issue from antithetical perspectives with the ambivalence such power arouses in. Beyond their skepticism, Montaigne and Hobbes share a concern for how phenomena can be interpreted and represented through language. Despite Hobbes's desire for a method that would ensure constant and determinate linguistic acts that would render rhetoric supererogatory, Leviathan demonstrates his unremarkable affinities with mainline Renaissance humanists alongside his uneasy affinities with the Sophists. Both the humanist and the Sophist used the trope to probe and to persuade, though both were anxious about the reversibility of such rhetorical redescriptions. Paradiastolic discourses, we argue, integrate the cognitive procedures of philosophy with the judicative procedures of rhetoric. The trope operates through exploiting the reciprocity between similar qualities, as exemplified by the influential paradiastolic pairing of ferox and fortis.

Abstract This article compares science and the novel as different rhetorical strategies for representing relationships to the limits of knowledge and what seems unknown. I draw on Kenneth Burke's (1957) figure of “equipment for living” to revive the question of the value of knowledge and art for life, identifying the comparison between science and the humanities itself as a social phenomenon and focusing on the uses and rhetorical value of such disciplines and of literature for life in a period ruled by concerns for so-called applied knowledge and dreams of its transfer and dissemination. In this way, I try to escape from a notion of rhetoric limited solely to social interaction and the mutual persuasiveness of selves in order to develop, by linking rhetoric to subjectivity, a rhetorical approach to the consciousness of a subject conceived as relating to the limits of what can be known.

Abstract In this essay, we examine public responses to Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, focusing in particular on the rhetorical strategies employed by political conservatives. We argue that the most prominent conservative reactions either undermined the potential for reasoned debate and a cohesive narrative regarding the causes of the attack or, by emphasizing Loughner’s agency as an individual, deranged actor, painted the event in a way that failed to provide transformative redemption, foreclosed even the possibility of a rhetorically satisfying sense of justice, and preempted what could otherwise have been a rich, deliberative deployment of civility. We utilize Kenneth Burke’s dramatism in speculating about possible alternative interpretations of the situation, hopeful that such an analysis might offer both the public and the government more effective rhetorical resources for dealing with and even preventing such increasingly common tragedies. In particular, we advocate the use of a hybrid, tragicomic frame—a sort of Burkean Serenity Prayer in which we accept the things we cannot change while still finding the inspiration, strength, and wisdom to respond productively—alongside a multifaceted set of pentadic ratios to address the complex demands created by mental illness.

Abstract In the immediate aftermath of the Tucson, Arizona, shootings in 2011, controversy erupted over the role, if any, that Tea Party rhetoric had played in inciting Jared Lee Loughner’s rampage. Especially controversial was Sarah Palin’s video, “America’s Enduring Strength,” which denied that this rhetoric was responsible and, in fact, celebrated it as quintessential free speech. This essay makes two related arguments. First, although context encourages audiences to expect political self-defense, Palin’s video is neither deliberative nor forensic but epideictic: a celebration of abstract values so severed from circumstances that Palin et al. become heroically, purely virtuous, while those who dare raise the question of responsibility that is central to deliberation (“who, or what, is to blame, and what, then, is to be done?”) become vicious. However, this move is obscured because Palin’s version of free speech simultaneously inhabits the prevailing, and limited, social and legal understanding of the First Amendment. Hence, we also argue that a consequentialist framework for free expression is less suited to revealing the video’s troubling rhetoric of free speech than is a constitutive framework, such as has been proffered by some scholars of hate speech. To the extent that the consequentialist framework dominates constitutional jurisprudence and public understanding, however, “America’s Enduring Strength” also manifests America’s enduring problem in coming to grips with Tucson and other mass shootings.

Under headings that include rhetoric of assent, critical understanding, pluralism, rhetorology, and listening-rhetoric, Wayne Booth’s scholarly work for over thirty-five years hinged on a simple question: “How can I get each side to understand the other?” Booth’s imbroglio with Kenneth Burke demonstrates that “understanding”—Booth’s key concept—is not confined, as Booth had suggested, to respecting opposing views, searching for common ground, and finding reasons that warrant shared assent. Understanding is also enabled and obstructed by a number of factors, including six I examine: form, process, emotion, differences, power, and additional rhetorical/material constraints. Analyzing Booth and Burke’s published exchange in Critical Inquiry (1974), along with their correspondence from 1972 to 1983, reveals how their disagreement evolved; how their prolonged dispute highlights limitations in Booth’s theory; and how Booth’s engagement with Burke, along with Booth’s subsequent reflections on their exchange, extends Booth’s project to offer a more rhetorically robust theory of understanding.

Creative writing is divided between instructors upholding New Critical emphasis on texts and those challenging the goals of the discipline. While innovators propose reform, reconceptions put instructors at odds with one another and with students. In compromise, I propose praxes that incorporate lore-based methodology with innovations from critical and rhetorical theory.

AbstractWhat emerged out of Kenneth Burke’s engagements with T. S. Eliot—particularly his engagements with Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral? An examination of Burke’s comments on Eliot in Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives, as well as in his unpublished correspondence reveals examples of the emerging and developing concepts surrounding Burkean identification. Taken in the context of Burke’s own conflicting commitments to aestheticist and social perspectives on art, such a portrait supports the thesis that identification is not a one-time state to be achieved, but instead is an ongoing rhetorical–dialectical process that must be constantly maintained through negotiation. Ultimately, for Burke, Eliot and Murder reflected the rhetorical concerns he dedicated his career to exploring: How do our perspectives limit us, how do they divide us, and how do we transcend those divisions? Notes1 Collected in the Kenneth Burke Papers housed in the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University. Quotations from the Kenneth Burke Papers are reproduced with permission from the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. The Malcolm Cowley quotation on page nine (which does not appear in Jay) is also taken from a letter in the Kenneth Burke Papers and reproduced with permission of Robert Cowley.2 Dana Anderson defines identification as “the process of perceiving the self in relation to the various social scenes it occupies” (26) while Gregory Clark likewise discusses identification (and more largely, rhetoric) as a process of interaction between self (individual) and collective identity (3).3 For example, Clark discusses “identifications” that occur in “moments of identification” (3), suggesting an underlying focus on identification as discrete, countable—a moment(or moments) at the end of a process. Anderson notes the process of identification as it relates to the construction and (strategic) deployment of identity, though this analysis of identification necessarily focuses on moments of fluctuating stability where identities are perceived in relation to social scenes (26).4 For more on the expansion of the modernist canon, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz.5 I should note here that I have found no evidence that Burke and Eliot ever actually spoke or corresponded. In an April 27, 1947 letter to James Sibley Watson, Burke mentions his plans to attend one of Eliot’s lectures on Milton the following Saturday; however, I have found no further mention of the lecture in Burke’s correspondence. Burke nevertheless analyzes Eliot’s literary and critical publications throughout his career, although I have no evidence that Eliot ever took note of Burke.6 For a detailed argument on Permanence and Change as a cultural history, see chapter 3 of George and Selzer.7 This passage, along with several others, was subsequently deleted in the 1954 revised edition of P&C. Here I have provided the 1935 edition page numbers for the excised content; however, other references to P&C in this manuscript, unless otherwise noted, refer to the reprinted 1984 University of California Press edition. For more on the printing history and “Lost Passages” of P&C, see Edward Schiappa and Mary Keehner.8 In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke accounts for heterogeneity in consubstantiality by explaining that a “thing’s identity would … be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure. However, ‘substance’ is an abstruse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements … an acting-together; and in the acting-together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (21). In other words, consubstantiality does not preclude heterogeneity because it is an act, not a state of being, and people can share in an act.9 I use transcendence here and throughout this essay in the Burkean sense—that is, the expansion of a particular perspective to encompass opposing perspectives.10 Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s retelling of the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by knights of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral. Burke’s focus is primarily on the actual death scene in the play, where Becket is killed and the four murderers turn and address the audience in prose to justify their act.11 Burke provides a succinct summary of this reading in a letter to Malcolm Cowley: “Issue: the approach to God through elegance. How you leave the old locale behind, because it isn’t elegant enough. How you build up elegance by antithesis. And then search for its reality-here-and-now abroad. But eventually discover that only God is elegant enough” (Burke to Cowley, April 13, 1936).12 It is worth noting that Burke eventually says the character of Saint Thomas “specifically use[s] the dramatist grammar” by meditating on human motives “in terms of ‘action’ and ‘passion’” (GM 263). This is, however, not a novel reading of the play—many critics have also noted the action-passion motif in Murder. In the book T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice, Carol H. Smith points out that a large part of the action-suffering motif “rests in the realization that to ‘act’ in the illusion of freedom from God’s laws is the strongest kind of bondage to the world of the senses, while to exercise the freedom of the will by ‘suffering’ God’s will is to be freed from the torture-wheel of life” (80–81).Burke further considers freedom and action-passion duality in the ending dialogue of The Rhetoric of Religion. Here, Satan explains that because acts are by definition free, human beings must also be free, since they are capable of action (281). The Lord goes on to point out that “action (along with its grammatical partner passion)” are the basis of drama, which is particularly important because “of the large part that the arts of comedy and tragedy will play in [humans’] outlook, extending even to their ideas of ultimate salvation” (281).13 Randy Malamud likewise describes this scene as a “shocking contrast to the play’s passionate crescendo” where the murderers “step forward and address the audience in prose rhetoric evocative of a sloppy after-dinner speech” (69).14 Burke will later point out in A Grammar of Motives that “Eliot specifically considers the action-motion relation” here (263).15 Of course, Burke makes a similar argument in his now oft-commented on address to the First American Writer’s Congress, titled “Revolutinoary Symbolism in America,” where he claims “The complete propagandist, it seems to me, would take an interest in as many imaginative, aesthetic, and speculative as he can handle—and into this breadth of his concerns weave a general attitude of sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive institutions” (Simmons and Melia 268).16 I infer this from the various ways Burke discusses Eliot in other sources. In the Rhetoric, Burke contrasts Eliot’s subdued, “smart” lamentations with the “full-throated outpourings of Biblical lamentations” (318). In the following letter, Mr. A is likewise unable to “make his bellyache full-throated,” so he couches it with cleverness and romantic irony.17 Eliot’s obvious discontent with modern life has become an interpretive staple for reading his work. See Carol Smith vii; Mary Karr ix–xxvii; Burton Raffel 8–10; and Peter Ackroyd.18 Tate’s article, to which Burke refers, is “A Poetry of Ideas,” published in the June 1926 issue of the New Republic. In the particular scene Tate examines, the speaker of the poem takes a critical (or Burke says, superior) tone toward a house agent’s clerk who is seducing a young woman.19 In between these October 4 and October 8 letters from Tate to Burke is Burke’s missing response in which he critiques Tate’s stance on Eliot. Although I searched, I could not find the text of Burke’s missing letter (written sometime between Oct 4 and 8, 1941), which I infer elucidates his misgivings toward Tate’s improvised psychology for Eliot. Neither the Kenneth Burke Papers at Pennsylvania State University nor the Allen Tate Papers at Princeton University had a copy, and as a result, I can only assemble Burke’s criticisms in light of Tate’s responses, which, while helpful in piecing together the quarrel, nonetheless leave some of the details of Burke’s thought to be discovered.20 For more sites of inquiry into Burke’s evolving notion of identification, under various guises, see “Boring from Within” (1931), “Auscultation, Creation, Revision” (1932), and “Twelve Propositions” (1938).21 For a brief overview of scholarship on Burke’s guilt-purification-redemption cycle, particularly as it focuses on victimage/mortification, see David Bobbit (9–10) and William Rueckert.22 See, for example, Jeanne Fisher’s Burkean analysis of murder/suicide as a symbolic act or Brian Ott and Eric Aoki’s analysis of Matthew Sheppard’s murder and the subsequent public/media response. For Fischer, mass murderer Joseph White’s act of killing, stood in for, or symbolized the internal attitude that festered inside him toward his victims (188). Furthermore, Ott and Aoki complicate this process by adding a social dimension to Fischer’s arguments. If, as Fischer might argue, the killing of Matthew Sheppard symbolized the attitude of homophobia present in larger American society, then Ott and Aoki argue that the media coverage of the Matthew Sheppard case emphasized Burke’s scapegoat process, functioning rhetorically “to alleviate the public’s guilt concerning anti-gay hate crimes and to excuse the public of any social culpability” (1). However, despite being intimately thematically connected to Burke’s ideas of slaying and symbolism—and despite being thorough, complex, and ground-breaking articles—neither Fisher nor Ott and Aoki engages explicitly with the slaying discussion from those first few pages of A Rhetoric of Motives.23 I need to explain the difference between my senses of “transformation” and “transcendence.” Transformation in the generic sense is any type of change (terminological, perspectival, etc.), while transcendence, as it has been used so far in the more specific Burkean sense, involves achieving a stance which encompasses opposing terms or perspectives. Therefore, for my purposes here, the transcendence Burke speaks of is a type of more generic transformation, although the terms are not interchangeable.24 This is in line with Ross Wolin’s claim that “Collaboration is the key to style as the engine of identification” (189).25 This is not a new claim, but an old claim with new dimensions. Timothy Crusius likewise argues that “When language is used to overcome … differences, to foster cooperation and establish community, we are in the realm of rhetoric” (24). However, the implication one can draw from Eliot’s wheel is that establishing community is not a one-time act—it requires constant negotiation and readjustment to preserve the consubstantiality achieved.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn BelkJohn Belk is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University, 134 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16803, USA. jmb851@psu.edu

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

On February 8, 2010, eleven student activists at the University of California–Irvine protested a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The disruptive nature of the protest by these students—advocates of Palestinian de-occupation and members of the Muslim Student Union—led to disciplinary action against their student organization and criminal prosecution in the local county court for disturbing the peace. This essay offers the results of an interview-based study exploring the rhetorical education of five of these college activists. The interviews reveal the powerful influence of family histories of activism and thoughtful reflections on the rhetorical dynamics of the Middle East conflict within local, national, and international publics. They also show student awareness of the limitations of the liberal-deliberative rhetorics that underpin most college writing courses. That students reported only a tenuous sense of connection between college courses and self-sponsored activist education suggests that teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition may need to give cocurricular activism more consideration in the next phase of the “social turn.”