In 1970, Burke and McKeon held a debate at the University of Chicago, with the topic the difference between “Rhetoric” and Poetic.” This debate has never before been published, and James Beasley and I present this debate with the following notes. We begin with our own interest in the debate, follow this with a brief outline of the debate, and then we make some observations about the significance of this debate for rhetorical scholarship today.

In The War of Words Burke uses the term scientific to describe the news “in the sense that it deals with information” but is also rhetorical since “it forms attitudes or induces to action.” In this essay I outline Burke’s major ideas in his “Scientific Rhetoric” chapter; present for consideration Burke’s assumptions about the press; and conclude with comments about how one might productively extend Burke’s insights into future studies of the news media.

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

This paper situates Lakoff’s metaphoric theory of political affiliation within Burke’s classification of poetic forms, and finds that Lakoff’s strict father and nurturant parent worldviews align with Burke’s tragic and comic forms. However, applying this to the 2016 Democratic debates complicates Lakoff’s view of political identity, and suggests that such identities are still better understood through the full range of Burkean identification, in which narrative and metaphor play important, but not singular, roles.

This essay examines the thirty-year career arc of professional wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts by employing a Burkean approach to understanding Roberts’s symbolically resonate performances of mortification . Through performances of mortification both during and following his active wrestling career, Roberts is transformed into a purifying agent for wrestling fans’ collective guilt over systemic “demons” of addiction and human frailty that have haunted professional wrestling and its fandom increasingly since the 1990s.

In 1970, Burke and McKeon held a debate at the University of Chicago, with the topic the difference between “Rhetoric” and Poetic.” This debate has never before been published, and James Beasley and I present this debate with the following notes. We begin with our own interest in the debate, follow this with a brief outline of the debate, and then we make some observations about the significance of this debate for rhetorical scholarship today.

In The War of Words Burke uses the term scientific to describe the news “in the sense that it deals with information” but is also rhetorical since “it forms attitudes or induces to action.” In this essay I outline Burke’s major ideas in his “Scientific Rhetoric” chapter; present for consideration Burke’s assumptions about the press; and conclude with comments about how one might productively extend Burke’s insights into future studies of the news media.

This essay analyzes the Heard Museum’s exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, a site that documents student experiences at off-reservation boarding schools in the United States. The essay pursues questions of materiality and memory in the creation and disruption of public memory narratives. More specifically, this essay attends to the meaning-making of objects and analyzes their contributions to the exhibit’s documentation and identification work. I argue the successful use of objects in this site holds two key implications for the rhetoric of public memory scholarship: (1) that objects are a resource for the rhetorical invention of public memory, and (2) that additional possibilities for documentation and identification may rest in objects. In making this argument, I thus theorize the relationship among public memory, objects, and settler colonialism, and call for increased attention to objects in our rhetorical histories and theories.

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

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

AbstractArgument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton’s taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure.

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

Reviewed by: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch Kate Rich Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Some interventions are long overdue, and Jessica Enoch knows how to make valuable interventions in the overlooked localities of gendered ideas. In Domestic Occupations, she attunes rhetorical studies to a historiography of where women work. Across the humanities, the spatial turn to recognize the politics of place considers race, gender, and sex.1 Yet, we still lack a lexicon for how places might transform the labor of marginalized people over time. Enoch approaches this task with rhetorical theory to examine how the domestic duties within private spaces, like a home, were rhetorically extended to less traditionally feminine tasks in public spaces. [End Page 240] The book begins with a rich variety of scholarly work in rhetoric, geography, and gender studies to make the case for the gendered and rhetorical history of spaces. For Enoch, “There is no arhetorical space” (9). Throughout the book, her archival work attends “to the material, ideological, pictorial, emotive, discursive, and embodied site of the home and the ways this site’s spatial rhetorics constrained and made possible women’s work outside the domestic arena” (171). These texts are representative of dominant discourses that centered white middle-class women and excluded what she calls other women. She cleverly guides readers through the spatio-rhetorical transformations of the schoolhouse, the laboratory, and the child-care center, making a notable claim in each case. Her first transformation is centered around New England schoolhouses in the nineteenth century. The notable claim that arises in this chapter is the idea that spaces perform gender like humans do. Aligning herself with Judith Butler, she argues, “when a space takes on new gendered meanings, the bodies expected to inhabit it and the identities constructed within it also change” (33). Initially, the home was imagined as offering a feminized place of stability and comfort while the classroom was likened to a masculinist prison wherein students were harshly disciplined. When the harshness of the schoolroom was critiqued and remodeled, the classroom gradually became a space for women once it was reconfigured to be more like the feminine home. The subsequent entry of women into the teaching profession resulted in class mobility for some women while also devaluing the teaching profession as a whole, due to its perception as a form of feminized labor. Domestic scientists towards the end of the nineteenth century serve as the second transformative case study. The notable claim here is that ethos can be revised through spatial rhetoric. Domestic scientists, Enoch argues, revised the home into a site of scientific complexity. While these women, often conservative and white, frequently distanced themselves from the women’s rights movement, Enoch insightfully points out that their cautious rhetorical reconfiguration of the home allowed many women to pursue science education. Through domestic advice manuals and public kitchen demonstrations, homemaking was transformed into a practice that required a laboratory. Enoch acknowledges that this transformation was very white and relied on some normative conceptions of femininity, but it raises an intriguing set of implications. Of all the chapters in the book, this is perhaps the richest in scholarly opportunities. Those invested in how white women engage in rhetorical strategies of whiteness may find this chapter useful. Additionally, scholars in the rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology might see potential to approach their objects of study with spatio-rhetorical analysis. The final case study is devoted to how the wartime child care center was transformed into an acceptable place to offset domestic labor and how it reverted back to an undesirable place at the end of World War II. In this chapter, Enoch makes the notable claim that spatial rhetorics are capable of being emotive. The maternal qualities of the home had to be rhetorically [End Page 241] transferred to the wartime childcare center to get women working during the war. Enoch skillfully asserts that visual rhetorics and the enargeia of childcare employees cuddling with children communicated that the center could operate as a secondary home To convince women to return to...

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

The foreword, written by Judy Z. Segal, begins with a brief dialogue between a patient and a nurse that illustrates the effects of discursive actions on health and medicine. It is a dialogue between a patient and a nurse, reminiscent of stories of ancient cartographers who mapped their changing and uncertain worlds through stories, discovering ever new riches in a world that wasn't flat. In the same way, contemporary thinkers in health and medicine are discovering the treasure in exploring rhetoric and technical communication across traditional boundaries. These authors move through previously uncharted territory with story and new questions that extend the boundaries of our individual bodies. They explore important questions of individual human agency and how that intersects with social and rhetorical theory. Critical questions new to medicine in the twenty-first century, such as resistance, power of representation, and where advocacy for health justice lies, are topics explored through a variety of lenses in this collection.

AbstractWhile many have critiqued the racist, sexist, and otherwise prejudiced nature of comedic rhetorics, few have considered how identity-based comedy, particularly racial comedy, functions productively, rather than merely oppressively. Studies of comedic rhetorics have primarily focused on Black and white comedians, but the increasing number and variety of popular comedians of color demands investigation into how comedians from different racial backgrounds use humor to rhetorically articulate the boundaries of their racial(ized) identities. This essay theorizes comedic rhetoric, particularly stereotypes in comedy, as a constitutive form of rhetoric that can articulate generative racial identities as they exist within the ambivalent spaces of in-group stereotypes. By pairing polysemy, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, and Tina Chen’s theory of impersonation to analyze the standup performances of Asian American comedian Ali Wong, this essay ultimately represents a necessary intervention into understanding racial comedy and stereotypes as potentially productive sites for examining racial identity.

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role.

Effectively addressing wicked problems requires collaborative, embedded action. But, in many cases, scholarly commitments, social justice, privilege, and precarity collide in ways that make it difficult for community-engaged scholars to ethically navigate competing duties. This article presents our efforts to support reciprocal community engagement in addressing cancer- obesity comorbidity and risk coincidence in underserved communities. Partnering with community healthcare professionals, we conducted an adapted Systems Ethnography/Qualitative Modeling (SEQM) study. SEQM offers an alternative ethical framework for community-engaged research, one that supports reciprocity through enabling participant-centered community self-definition, goal setting, and solution identification.

This article examines textual artifacts surrounding Google Lens, an image recognition application, to reveal how it forwards reductive representations of the complex sets of relations constituted through locative media and augmented reality. Working across textual and posthumanist traditions, this article introduces a theoretical approach for investigating the rhetoric of technology, termed the postsymbolic. In acknowledging the formative and ontological role discursive rhetoric plays in the spatial operations and user experiences of and through locative media, the postsymbolic asserts the need for an integrated approach in which symbolic artifacts might be examined through the lens of both discursive rhetorical theory and posthumanism.

As corrective to rhetorical theorists who disparage “expression,” the following article analyzes Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Kenneth Burke on “expression” and its communicative counterpart “sympathy.” Pater viewed ideal style as a unity of expression and sympathy. Wilde saw Christ as the singular representative of absolute expression and sympathy. Burke resolved both expression and sympathy into the “compromise” of the symbol. I advocate for a return to expression and sympathy as rhetorical values in the twenty-first century.

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

Reviewed by: Attic Oratory and Performance by Andreas Serafim Matteo Barbato Andreas Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies), London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 156 pp. ISBN 9780367871277 In this slim book, Andreas Serafim sets out to provide a holistic perspective on the performative aspects of Attic oratory through an analysis of two pairs of interrelated judicial speeches: Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ respective speeches On the Embassy; and Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon and Demosthenes’ On the Crown. As stated in his introduction, Serafim believes that the speeches of the Attic orators, despite surviving as written texts, can only be fully appreciated if one gives appropriate weight to the interaction between speaker and audience. He adopts an approach based on linguistics and performance studies. This leads him to define performance as the “interactive communication, explicit or otherwise, between the transmitter of a message and its receiver” (pp. 16–17)—in other words, as anything that enables the speaker to elicit a reaction in the audience. Serafim distinguishes between two types of performance techniques (direct/sensory and indirect/emotional) and proposes to look at both in combination. In Chapter 1, Serafim lays out the methodology of his study. He identifies the main areas of performance (rhetorical construction of the audience; relationship between oratory and theatre; inter-generic character portraiture; delivery) that provide the subjects of Chapters 2–5, and he illustrates them through references to ancient and modern scholarship. The discussion, though mostly solid, is at times undertheorized. This is most evident in the analysis of emotions in pp. 21–3. Despite rightly stressing the significance of emotions for performance,i Serafim overlooks an important body of scholarship that highlights the complex nature of emotions, which encompass [End Page 114] social and cognitive as well as bodily aspects.ii Engaging with such studies could have nuanced the distinction between sensory and emotional performance techniques and could have offered an interesting lens for investigating delivery. Chapter 2 examines the strategies (e.g. emotional appeals; imperatives and questions) deployed by the orators to construct the identity of their audience and invite them to act accordingly. Chapter 3 analyses the interrelationship between oratory and theatre, with a focus on the characterisation of one’s opponents as deceitful actors on the judicial stage. While Serafim provides a good discussion of Demosthenes’ use of poetic quotations to stress Aeschines’ connection with theatre, it is surprising that no comparison is made with Aeschines’ own use of quotations in Against Timarchus. This would have allowed Serafim to investigate Aeschines’ negotiation of his image as an actor and its significance for our understanding of Athenian attitudes to theatre. Chapter 4 looks at the orators’ construction of their own and their opponents’ character through patterns borrowed from comedy as well as tragedv and epics. Serafim rightly notes that the judges had experience as theatregoers, which he suggests was exploited by the orators to create favourable and unfavourable dispositions towards themselves and their opponents respectively. Chapter 5 focuses on delivery and is the most effective in stressing the interconnection between the different aspects of performance analysed in the book. Through comparison between rhetorical theory and oratorical practice, Serafim convincingly shows how some rhetorical features of the speeches may be taken as indicative of the gestural and vocal ploys adopted by the orators as part of their performance. Chapter 6 briefly summarises the book’s findings and delineates possible areas for future research. Serafim is at his best when providing rhetorical analyses of specific passages, and he makes a convincing case for understanding performance as a multidimensional phenomenon. The book, however, is somewhat lacking in conceptual breadth, as its main merit lies in combining existing strands in scholarship that focus respectively on oratorical delivery and on rhetoric’s relationship with drama. Serafim’s arguments are sometimes weakened by a lack of engagement with the institutional nature of judicial oratory. At pp. 48–9, for example, Serafim argues that Aeschin. 3.8 addresses the judges with the civic address (“men of Athens”) as opposed to the judicial address (“judges”) in order to make them “realise that both their duty and their status as judges is wholly intertwined with the best interests of...

This essay examines the supplicatory letter the Swedishborn Helena, marchioness of Northampton, addressed to Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, in 1576 or 1577, hoping he would help her regain access to Elizabeth I. The essay situates the letter within the early modern patronage system and the court environment, but foremost within the field of early modern letter-writing in general, and the supplicatory letter in particular. The essay shows how a number of rhetorical strategies, designed to inspire pity and benevolence mainly through ethos and pathos, are employed to create positions for both supplicant and addressee. In this way, the letter reaches the desired goal of regaining royal presence. By looking at the letter through the frames of early modern letter-writing and more general rhetorical practise, the essay points to a tension between the letter’s stated sentiment of “utter confusion” and its highly formalised expression, indicative of the letter’s rhetorical situation and especially of the constraints related to its sender’s social status. The letter is transcribed in an

A large number of U.S. university writing centers (WCs) hire undergraduates as peer tutors, and many of them are menstruators. Menstruators have received strong cultural messages, including that menstruation should be concealed. Menstruating tutors’ damaged self-recognition received from the world around them can lead to internalized self-identification and further impact their perceptions of their knowledge and consultations with student writers every day in WCs. The acceptance and accessibility of menstrual products in WCs would help boost work ethic among menstruating tutors and break down the taboo about menstruation. To explore what impact such acceptance and accessibility exert on menstruating tutors, we conducted a mixed methods case study on menstruating tutors’ perceptions about themselves, their professionalism and work ethic, as well as their experiences, with and without having free access to menstrual products at their WC. We collected data via a set of pre and post surveys and individual interviews of 15 participants at the WC. The quantitative data from pre and post surveys did not reveal statistical significance, while the qualitative data helped explain why there was no statistical significance. Nevertheless, integration of all the data from this pioneering project has contributed rich findings to the existing WC scholarship about space and access, mindfulness, and social justice at large. The findings have practical applications to day-to-day WC practice.

We report on a survey of students and alumni, examining their “rhetorical training”—their writing knowledge and experiences across multiple courses, campus employment, and workplace contexts. The survey asked participants to identify their most often written genres and their most valued type of writing, the rhetorical situations in which they compose their most valued genre, and the writing processes they have developed. We examined the multiple sources of rhetorical training that participants believe prepared them to write their most valued genre. Multiple rhetorical training experiences prepare writers for the writing they value, and both students and alumni describe robust writing processes and appreciate feedback from others. Yet alumni continue to express challenges adapting writing for new audiences and genres.

The Queer Caucus created the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award to honor Anzaldúa’s impact on “studies of both rhetoric and queer theory” through forging “connections across difference and oppression in order to dismantle systems of privilege, whether that be heterosexism, heteronormativity, racism, sexism or ableism (as a non-exhaustive list).” However, the text of the Award, along with its impetus, belies these intentions. The Award erases Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad from her work and her person through the emphasis on culture-less sexual and gender minority experiences, the redefinition of Anzaldúa’s work as focused on generalized difference and oppression, and the omission of any substantive acknowledgment of her Chicanidad. This essay examines the erasure of Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad and the appropriation of Anzaldúa as a race-less and culture-less liberatory figure through the operation of homonormativity and whiteness. I analyze the text and impetus of the Award through an analytical framework rooted in the rhetorical concepts of Kenneth Burke and Gloria Anzaldúa’s own concerns about erasure and appropriation through homonormativity and whiteness. I argue that the meaningful change to the text and its authorship, as well as to meaningful inclusion of queers of color, is necessary for the Award to continue.

ABSTRACT Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1974 chapter on dissociation in the comic furthers our understanding of the rhetorical possibilities of dissociation, revealing how the concept can dismantle old worldviews and create new ones through laughter. Thanks to issues with translation and the chapter's obscure examples, however, this text has been largely overlooked by scholars. This article grounds the chapter's theories in examples with more contemporary resonance as a necessary first step toward understanding the full scope of Olbrechts-Tyteca's contributions to the concept of dissociation. Considering Olbrechts-Tyteca's chapter in light of other texts from the New Rhetoric Project also calls attention to the ways that translation practices have shaped scholars' reception and use of the Project's concepts.

ABSTRACTThe sections devoted to dissociation in The New Rhetoric identify many verbal forms that can express this reconceptualizing line of argument. This article reviews the linguistic options offered in English for epitomizing dissociations, including tautologies and constructions that prompt diverging meanings, orthographical devices like capitalization or subscripts that produce variants of a single word, word schemes like agnominatio and polyptoton that alter core forms, and affixes or modifiers that are either available as antonyms or require forcing apart by subsequent antitheses. Paying attention to the verbal expression of dissociations highlights cases that may or may not qualify as the rich reconceptualizations Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca had in mind. Arguments that involve three distinguished terms may, for example, reach a limit where dissociations merge into arguments from division, a long recognized device in traditional rhetoric/dialectic.

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

ABSTRACTThis study explores the influence of the French Symbolist poet, novelist, and literary critic Remy de Gourmont on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's conception of dissociation. It proposes translatio—the medieval trope describing a transfer of ideas—as a lens through which to read the significance of Gourmont's thought on the New Rhetoric Project (NRP). Thus forgoing more traditional comparative approaches such as intertextuality, this study argues that translatio serves here as a particularly valuable conceptual tool: it unveils the evolution of Perelman's thought over time, and Olbrechts-Tyteca's significant contribution to it; it also provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between association (in the guise of analogy) and dissociation in the NRP than what is generally understood by scholars of the Traité. More importantly, translatio unveils the features that make their conception of dissociation one of the truly innovative aspects of the NRP.

ABSTRACTThis essay tells the story of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's “dissociation of concepts,” which they introduced in 1958 and is in use as a tool of criticism by many rhetorical critics. The story begins in England with John Locke's development of associative reasoning in 1770 and then moves to France, with Remy de Gourmont extending associative reasoning with the concept of dissociation in 1899. Gourmont's dissociation crosses the Atlantic and is then developed by Kenneth Burke in 1931. In turn, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca absorbed and expanded Locke, Gourmont, and Burke's theories of association and dissociation in 1958. They crafted a tool, the dissociation of concepts, that equips rhetorical reasoning with the capacity to navigate between the promise and perils of fission and fusion. Since 1958, many scholars have made productive use of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's innovation. The essay concludes with some possible futures for their dissociation of concepts.

ABSTRACT Dissociation is considered by many to be Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's most innovative and significant contribution to rhetorical theory. Currently on display in American debates over racial justice and public health, dissociation is a nuanced process of conceptual reconfiguration. After exploring how dissociation figures in these debates, the introduction summarizes how scholars over the years have extended and complicated the concept. The introduction then identifies key gaps in scholarship that are addressed by the articles included in this special section, including dissociation's philosophical genesis, its linguistic manifestations, its structural possibilities, and its role in comedic discourse.

ABSTRACTOne of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention.

The article reports on a nationwide survey- and interview-based study of creative writing instructors designed to identify the extent to which the field of rhetorics and composition and key aspects of rhetorical theory have influenced the teaching of creative writing.

Scholarship on the rhetoric of reproduction, childbirth, and motherhood has mostly focused on a U.S. context. Drawing on oral histories that we collected from a small group of Estonian women who gave birth during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, we argue that women’s experiences of childbirth in Soviet maternity hospitals and during the postpartum period can be interpreted as micro-rhetorical interactions through which arguments about the worth or value of a particular identity are communicated implicitly and intangibly. The gendered nature of these micro-rhetorical interactions helps to explain the often observed-upon gap between the official Soviet rhetoric of gender equality and the persistently patriarchal nature of Soviet society. Ultimately, we argue that examining the rhetoric of pregnancy and childbirth in an authoritarian political context also necessitates rethinking the functions of and possibilities for rhetorical agency.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. Link to PDF

Research Article| September 01 2020 (Re)-Signing Reconciliation: Reading Obama’s Charleston Eulogy through a Rhetorical Theory of Adaptive Racism Mark Lawrence McPhail Mark Lawrence McPhail Mark Lawrence McPhail is a Senior Research Fellow in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs at Indiana University. I wish to thank Professor Martin Medhurst for his sustained and ongoing commitment to inclusive excellence, diversity, and equity, Professors Aaron David Gresson, III, John Hatch and David Frank for their courage, commitment, and integrity, and Dr. Evelyn Boise Bottando for showing me the clear connection between white privilege, innocence, and sociopathy. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (3): 529–552. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Lawrence McPhail; (Re)-Signing Reconciliation: Reading Obama’s Charleston Eulogy through a Rhetorical Theory of Adaptive Racism. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2020; 23 (3): 529–552. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bayes's theorem allows us to use subjective thinking to find numerical values to formulate assessments of risk. It is more than a mathematical formula; it can be thought of as an iterative process that challenges us to imagine the potential for "unknown, unknowns." The heuristics involved in this process can be enhanced if they take into consideration some of the established risk assessment and communication models used today in technical communication that are concerned with the social construction of meaning and the kairos involved in rhetorical situations. Understanding the connection between Bayesian analysis and risk communication will allow us to better convey the potential for risk that is based on probabilistic assumptions.

The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.

Communities are in constant flux, shifting within a network of people, things and spaces; yet it is not uncommon to see a universal narrative emerge within the local commonplace of our towns and cities. These narratives are often too simplistic, avoiding the dynamic array of rhetorical flows that are circling through the social, material and… Continue reading Walking in Jamaica: Exploring the Boundaries and Bridges of Rhetorical Agency by Brent Lucia