This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback interventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback intervention—screencast response to written work—through students’ perceptions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating transparency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a conversational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and distinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional process enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, especially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

This article examines the role of reflective practice in rhetoric and composition scholarship and argues for reconsidering practice through posthumanism. It (re)introduces posthumanism as a productive frame for considering rhetorical training in a networked age. In place of reflective practice, the article develops the concept of "posthuman practice" as a serial and material activity for rhetorical training. The article concludes by reconsidering metacognition and how reframing rhetoric as a posthuman practice could affect rhetorical pedagogy and ethics.

Research problem: Increasingly, professional and technical communicators analyze, synthesize, and respond to user-generated content, including online consumer reviews of products, as the influence of user-generated content on consumers' purchasing decisions grows. But product reviews vary in the degree to which people perceive them to be credible. Research questions: (1) To what extent does a product review's environment-a retailer or brand site-affect review users' ratings of that review's credibility? (2) To what extent does review valence (positive versus negative) affect review users' ratings of review credibility? (3) What is the strength of the relationship among credibility and its two main components, trustworthiness and expertise? Literature review: Recent research has made clear the spread and the influence of user-generated comments and, thus, the need for sophistication in handling it. Review credibility has two main components: trustworthiness (which equates to honesty or sincerity) and expertise (which equates to accuracy). Prior research also shows the effects of valence (positivity or negativity) in reviews, noting that negative reviews have more influence than positive reviews on readers' perceptions of review credibility and purchasing decisions. Methodology: We tested the effect of a consumer review's environment (brand or retailer site) and the effect of review valence (positive or negative) on the perceived credibility of that review, as well the degree of correlation among credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise. Through an online survey, we exposed respondents to the same review text with different star ratings (4-star and 2-star) in two types of sites: brand and retailer. We asked participants to evaluate the review's credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise. In half of the exposures, participants evaluated a review in the site of a high-credibility company (Apple or Amazon), and in the other half of exposures, participants evaluated a review in the site of a midlevel-credibility company (Dell or Walmart). Results and conclusions: Credibility strongly correlated with both trustworthiness and expertise. Participants rated 4-star reviews as more credible than 2-star reviews on high-credibility sites, but star ratings had no impact on midlevel credibility sites. We found no difference between ratings of reviews displayed on brand and retailer sites for midlevel-credibility companies but a small difference between reviews displayed on brand and retailer sites for high-credibility companies. Professional communicators should attend to reviews posted both to retailer and brand sites. Conclusions: Professional communicators charged with managing user-generated content need not spend resources on channeling it into retailer and other independent review site environments as opposed to brand site environments. Our findings indicate that professional communicators looking to identify credible reviews should attend to review valence, or the positivity or negativity of a review. When managing user-generated product reviews, they should try to make credible content more noticeable to review users.

Research problem: Organizations are increasingly investing in virtual customer communities that reduce communication barriers between organizations and customers. However, little is known regarding how virtual customer communities might affect a firm's learning and innovation activities. Research question: What effects do virtual customer communities have on the relationship between absorptive capacity and organizational innovation? Literature review: Research has shown that virtual customer communities promote knowledge creation and knowledge sharing by facilitating communication within a virtual customer community. We investigate the extent to which interactivity in virtual customer communities influences the relationship between a firm's absorptive capacity (the ability to identify, assimilate, and apply external knowledge) and the extent to which a firm develops incremental and radical innovations. Methodology: We test this model with a quantitative survey-based research design that involves 102 firm-sponsored virtual customer communities. We use hierarchical regression techniques to test our hypotheses. Results: Absorptive capacity is positively related to incremental innovation and negatively related to radical innovation. Furthermore, virtual customer community interactivity moderates the relationship between absorptive capacity and incremental innovation. Conclusions: Virtual customer communities are transforming communication relationships between organizations and customers in ways that influence a firm's learning and innovation activities. One limitation of our study is the use of a single respondent for our survey. We recommend that future research examine how virtual customer communities affect organization-customer communication channels.

In the previous issue of Business and Professional Communication, we focused on flipped classrooms and discovery learning. We continue that broad stream of research with our articles in this issue, most of which engage students in projects designed to facilitate learning in business and professional communication. Implementing projectbased learning can be challenging, and case studies can reveal issues that may be unanticipated in textbooks. Our lead article reports on the role of a commissioned research project in bridging the gap between theory and practice. At the authors’ research site, organizations representing different sectors of the corporate and nonprofit workplace commission teams of students in business and professional communication to act as their communication experts. The specific case discussed in this article is based on a study carried out by a team of five master’s-level students to promote corporate social responsibility in a professional association of a pharmaceutical industry. The authors analyze the student researchers’ perspectives, as well as the practitioners’ view of the collaboration, and the pitfalls involved in helping put theory into practice in a real-world situation. Our second article presents the results of an actual employee program evaluation as a case study of soft skills training at a large hospital. The authors posit four hypotheses, that greater reported willingness to learn will result in both a higher degree of course comprehension and a higher degree of behavioral change and that the method of delivery will affect trainees’ degree of comprehension and degree of behavioral change. The authors conclude that face-to-face or blended instruction is likely to be more effective than a purely online format. The authors of our third article examine the factors needed for success in group assignments. In a study of cooperativeness, assertiveness, group satisfaction, leader grade, and leadership negotiation, the authors find that group satisfaction is positively related to both leader assertiveness and leader cooperativeness. This research emphasizes the importance of the leader’s role to group outcomes and suggests that assertiveness is a critical component to success. 651428 BCQXXX10.1177/2329490616651428Business and Professional Communication QuarterlyKnight editorial2016

This article outlines a student-centered, ‘hands-on’ approach to the teaching of writing at university level through first discovering and then creating the features of written texts in three dimensions: microtextual (lexico-grammar), macrotextual (rhetoric), and extratextual (context). The ‘3-D’ approach has been designed for novice writers, offering a practical, step-by-step procedure to prepare them to write in specific disciplines and for specific purposes. Though usable with other audiences, the sample material included here is especially appropriate for second-language writers and will be of particular interest to students of science. While the approach is consistent with Systemic-Functional and ESP orientations to text, as contrasted with most ESP pedagogy – especially that geared to students in sciences – the 3-D approach gives particular attention to affect, writer–reader interaction, and shared context. The approach, which starts from analysis of texts and then moves to writing of texts, is first described and then illustrated using several short popular science texts about insects and birds. These texts exemplify lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features of scientific texts while also illustrating other purposes which a writer may seek to fulfill as well as the underlying assumptions and author biases that might exist even in texts which appear to be purely descriptive or ‘objective’. The texts and analyses provided are intended for classroom use to train students in the approach, supplemented by a step by step guide for students to follow. Through the activities provided for the sample texts, students develop awareness of the properties of texts and how these can be discovered through analysis and then written into their own texts.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

In 1970, black autoworker James Johnson, Jr., fatally shot three people at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axel Plant in Detroit. The shooting occurred three years after a devastating urban uprising and in the context of black militant labor organizing in local automotive plants. After a legal defense arguing racism and labor exploitation provoked his actions, Johnson was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. In this essay, I attend to the defense strategy that attempted to retain the political critique implicit in Johnson’s “black rage” while working within the constraints of jurisprudential and clinical notions of “insanity.” The Johnson case suggests that the mobilization of black affect is an always-ambivalent endeavor that can enable radical critique and political practice, while also subordinating black rhetorical agency.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary efforts to advocate for job security for teaching-track faculty in English studies, especially in composition, can be enhanced by identifying and reconfiguring two types of negative affects: those circulating around the “affective labor” required to teach writing and those circulating around the educational spaces in which such labor typically occurs. After defining my terms, I begin analyzing the impact of these two types of negative affect on calls for teaching-track job security. I then use Grego and Thompson’s “studio” model of basic writing as an example of teaching work that can be used to generate and circulate positive affects regarding the “affective-labor-in-space” performed by writing teachers. Finally, I articulate three premises designed to help articulate and emplace positive affects regarding teaching-track composition work such that possibilities for job security are enhanced.

Drawing from cultural studies and social justice education, this essay argues for the productive potential of racial inquiry in composition scholarship and pedagogy. Ethical imperatives facing rhetoric and composition are also pedagogical opportunities:to rethink multiculturalism, politicize student affect, and develop student-centered writing processes predicated upon deliberative critical inquiry.

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

Drawing from interviews and book discussions with eleven women who read popular romance fiction, in this article I examine the affective, embodied, and identificatory reading practices that constitute women's engagements with romance novels. I argue that while these women's reading practices do not resemble what typically are called critical reading practices, they nevertheless produce critical knowledges and should be examined as an alternative framework for approaching texts.

In the wake of research showing failures in transfer of writing skills, the question of how to help students see how their learning goes beyond individual learning experiences has become a pressing concern in composition.In addressing this concern, scholars have primarily focused on improving our classroom pedagogy so that we are teaching for transfer.However, with the finding that transfer often needs to be cued and guided in order to be successful, we need to begin focusing on writing centers as crucial spaces for the facilitation of students' understanding of the transportability of writing-related knowledge.This article presents findings from a study that examines the effects of teaching writing center tutors about transfer theory.Findings suggest that educating writing center tutors about transfer theory can positively affect their ability to facilitate the transfer of writing-related knowledge.

Foodways literacies offer composition courses a rich opportunity to enact a “sensual pedagogy” that explores affect through cross-cultural culinary encounters. In this assignment description, I present a class I developed at the University of Kentucky, Taco Literacy, as an example of such pedagogy. The class explores the languages and literacies of Mexican migration through the lens of emotionally resonant foodways.

Drawing on results from a survey distributed nationally through the WPA and WCenter listservs, we examine the affective aspect of failure in teachers’ responses to student writing, aiming to pinpoint teachers’ perceptions of why students fail. Overall, we posit that writing studies needs to pay closer attention to teachers’ emotional responses to student failure. This article represents a step in that direction.

Gretchen Flesher Moon’s 2003 analysis of emotion’s treatment in composition textbooks revealed that pathos "gets very short shrift" or none at all. Since then, however, conversations regarding affect and emotion have advanced in both scope and sophistication. This proliferation of scholarly activity has brought the passions of persuasion to a new level of prominence. This essay asks to what extent and in what ways these developments have manifested in representations of pathos in composition textbooks. In doing so, the article traces a through-line from Moon’s essay to now in order to provide a broader perspective of pathos in composition studies, and concludes with three recommendations for moving forward: 1) define emotion; 2) specify emotions; and 3) replace warnings and limits with complexity and curiosity.

Rhetoric and composition scholars’ almost exclusive reliance on Brian Massumi’s definition of affect has spurred a theoretical and practical divorce between “affect” and “emotion” in our field. This article returns to Lynn Worsham’s Going Postal and argues that to fully scrutinize and respond to what she calls “pedagogic violence,” affects and emotions must be theorized in tandem, especially as violent rhetorics increasingly spread through new media. Through a close reading of Massumi’s work, consideration of alternate affect theories, and discussion of Aristotle’s systematic theory of emotions, I illustrate how inseparable affects are from emotions. I examine the affects and emotions at work in a contemporary example of pedagogic violence—police brutality toward African Americans—and suggest new media not just contributes to but also disrupts violent rhetorics, damaging emotional educations, and negative affective relations, which I explore through a brief analysis of Twitter.

In this interview, Daniel M. Gross argues for an expansive rhetorical approach to emotion studies, one bridging composition, psychology, history, politics, and even theology. Speaking to compositionists, Gross begins by talking about writers’, teachers’, and administrators’ emotions, those possible and prohibited not in the classroom but in co-curricular activities—including tree-hugging. He also elaborates on his critique of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing for its exclusive focus on positive emotions. The conversation then touches on contemporary political issues such as the putative waning of affect in postmodern society, the revaluing of love in Third Wave feminist scholarship, the angry white male, and the BlackLivesMatter movement. Next, Gross brings his philosophical training to bear in discussing the vocabulary of emotion studies, including “pathos” and “affect,” and he addresses how students’, and prisoners’, writing can serve as a prosthetic for their sponsors’ emotional needs. The interview concludes with a comment about style.

In this essay, I build on current work in rhetorical genre theory to read a historical genre for the affective uptake(s) it generates. Medically authored child-rearing advice literature developed as a genre in Britain between 1825 and 1850; this new genre instantiated anxiety as the central affect of middle-class maternal subjectivity. This rhetorical genre analysis both extends our understanding of this period and the history of motherhood; it also contributes to the developing affective turn in rhetorical genre studies by offering a way to begin reading for affective uptakes.

Abstract This article explores how the children of immigrants queried and enacted the immigrant bargain narrative in their orientations to literacy and schooling at an afterschool program in New York City. The Mexican American elementary school students in this study expressed a common “immigrant bargain” narrative, a working-class immigrant family story of parents’ past and present sacrifices redeemed and validated through their children’s future academic merits (Louie 23; Smith 123). Language differences, transnational movements, and family histories affect how the children of immigrants imagine their parents’ migrations and their own transnational identities and literacies. Their identities as students, for example, compelled them to perceive their academic work ethic as repayment for their parents’ sacrifices, doubled with sometimes unreasonably high academic expectations for literacy achievement measured by merit. Literacy mentors and educators unfamiliar with the immigrant bargain should be attuned to its power for autobiographical writing, expressing both what motivates and constrains family migrations and second-generation students in their own academic goals. Afterschool program organizers, youth mentors, and school counselors especially should consider how the narrative builds confianza, or trust, and offers space for encouraging a transnational orientation to literacy in dialogue with immigrant families’ academic motives, goals, and preferences.

In this article, I examine the role of affect management in the transnational migration of Filipino care workers. Drawing on qualitative research in the Philippines, I claim that in government-mandated skills training, opportunities for Filipino migrants to critically engage in print and English literacies were often limited to standardized and rote practices to enhance transferability. In response, these migrant workers turned to affective literacies to engage in the kind of critical thinking and knowledge transformation necessary to challenge their labor conditions or simply survive the daily traumas of migrant life. While policies for skills-based labor migration categorize workers and their migration trajectories through a high-skills/low-skills divide, I suggest that affect management is the “high-skilled” work in such contexts where the mobility and flexibility of the global economy are experienced as precarity and insecurity. This reversal of high-low skill categories prompts a re-imagining of the transnational movement of labor—one where worker-citizens and their literacies move through a continuous series of affective attachments to and detachments from the nation-state.

Henri Dunant visited Italy to find Napoleon III in order to make a financial appeal. Shortly after Dunant’s arrival, he witnessed the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a particularly brutal moment in the attempts to unify Italy. From witnessing the battle and the care for the wounded, Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino to call for a peacetime organization that would better administer care for the wounded. In his appeal Dunant counts on significant affective responses from his audience, yet he emphasizes administration and planning as the way to manage and channel the overwhelming affective responses that come from war.

Background: When an organization decides to adopt a technology, such as a content-management system (CMS), the choice affects writing styles and processes, and conversely, writing styles affect the implementation of the technology. This case study compares and contrasts the experiences of writers in organizations that implemented different types of CMSs: a web CMS (WCMS) and a component CMS (CCMS), with a focus on the different types of training given to each group to facilitate the implementations. Research questions: (1) What are the dependencies between technology choices and the corollary editorial constraints that writers must consider in order to realize the benefits that the technology can bring? (2) What types of training are needed to ensure that writers become fully productive in a collaborative, structured-authoring environment? Situating the case: When adopting structured information technologies, such as CMS, organizations seek to reduce costs and improve efficiencies through the reuse and better management of content components, such as text and images, which can significantly reduce the costs of translation, reproduction, and maintenance of publications. Structured information technologies, such as a CMS, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Darwin Information Technology Architecture (DITA) affect technical communicators by changing writing styles to a more structured, topic-based approach, by introducing new tools and concepts for authoring and publishing, and by requiring more involvement in the selection, use, and maintenance of the technologies. Previous efforts to address these issues through training include works by Critchlow, who addressed the use of database systems to address challenges in developing documentation in collaborative environments; Edgell, who related how technical communicators proposed a CMS-based documentation solution to a software firm; and Lanier, who described how one organization overcame the resistance to new structured information technologies by writers. Methodology: The case was studied as an experience report by one of this article's authors (Bailie), in which the organizations engaged a consultant during their CMS implementation projects. The observations are qualitative and reflect consulting engagements with two teams over a period of almost three years. About the case: A common problem in implementing CMSs is interdependencies between content structures, on which the technology depends, and the editorial changes required to ensure that the content is best structured to take full advantage of the capabilities of the technology chosen. This case describes a four-phase training process provided to two clients: one with several contributors to the content-management effort in a single location; the other with more than a dozen contributors in several locations. Each client received four phase of training: (1) theoretical training-understanding pertinent theories behind good content development; (2) application of theory-how to apply the theories to their workplace; (3) software training-learning the new software to produce the content; (4) production-support immediately following training, during implementation. The results of the training were to increase the skill levels of the writers to understand how to leverage content in powerful ways using sophisticated technology. Conclusions: Determine the production needed for the content when choosing a class of CMS to address those production needs. Afterwards, match the training of the writers to the complexity of the system. Content strategists, project managers, technical communicators, and others involved in implementing a CMS need to allow sufficient time and training for writers to adjust their skills to the new technology and the new processes and techniques required to effectively use them.

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) has emerged as an academic field primarily devoted to opening inquiry into the relationship between human and nonhuman objects. By treating human and nonhuman things as ontologically coequal, this emerging philosophical school has rejected the correlationist and anthropocentric tendencies of most ethical systems. However, as objects expand and multiply, some become so big that they can't be seen, understood, or described in the ordinary spatiotemporal sense. Precisely because they are here but cannot be consistently experienced, these unique objects have severely complicated our lifeworld. For example, global warming can be remedially understood as a sum of many small objects (particulate matter, sunlight, thermometer readings, hurricanes, raindrops, etc.), but it is also an object itself—one so massive that we can't point to it or wrap our (scientific) heads around it. Similarly, plutonium-239 can be thought of as a simple object (an isotope or fuel for a nuclear reactor), but with deadly radiation and a half-life of 24,100 years, its real scale is not comprehensible. Oil fields, capitalism, cities, and endocrine disruptors share a similar set of properties.These objects, coined “hyperobjects” by Timothy Morton, are very real; yet, they exist beyond, and independently of, the reality of humans (15). Part 1 of the book is dedicated to defining hyperobjects, while part 2 addresses the social issues raised by OOO. Part 2 also offers unique solutions and some poignant criticism of the rhetoric of environmentalists. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Morton seeks to answer two questions: what are hyperobjects, and how can we develop ethical, political, and social systems that account for the unique characteristics of hyperobjects? In answering the first, Morton details five shared properties of hyperobjects: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity.Hyperobjects are viscous because they are stuck to us and we are stuck to them (28). The feeling of heat on the back of our necks is emitted by global warming and becomes stuck to us in the form of rashes, burns, and cancer. The bisphenol A (a controversial industrial chemical used in plastics), radiation, and mercury flowing through our bodies may not be visible, but they are quite real: “They are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there they are, impossible to shake off” (35). Global warming can't be wished away by denialists, and plutonium-239 doesn't lose its radioactive force simply because humans have decided it would be better off stored in Yucca Mountain. In short, the property of viscosity certifies the presence of hyperobjects.Hyperobjects are nonlocal because they are not here, despite the fact that human objects feel their presence. For example, most of the worst effects of global warming will be geographically limited to the people least responsible for the phenomenon. Decisions made in developed countries to produce and consume billions of tons of carbon will primarily impact the periphery at a dramatic scale. Shorelines in Pacific island countries will recede and indigenous nations in the Arctic will lose vital components of their local culture. However, drowning islands and melting ice are just local manifestations of “some vast entity that” we are “unable directly to see” (47–48). Importantly, these local manifestations do not function synecdochically—we do not come closer to the hyperobject of global warming simply because we see that it has “distributed pieces,” nor do we understand the hyperobject of radiation by surveying Chernobyl (49).The property of nonlocality diminishes the ability of science to prove the evolution or effect of hyperobjects. Scientific devices are intrinsically local, which leaves ample room for skepticism with regard to strict causality. For example, traditional scientific measurements can't guarantee that carbon emissions strengthened Hurricane Sandy or that the Daiichi nuclear disaster definitively caused radiation exposure in Berkeley. This geographical distance feeds the denialist meme that cold weather in one locality denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming writ large. Morton regards this “right-wing talking head” strategy as a “desperate attempt” to avert the ontological disaster posed by global warming (48).Hyperobjects are temporally undulated because they are “time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind” (58). Hyperobjects are here now, but their dramatic timescales confuse and irritate cognitive maps. Although humans can likely comprehend the number 24,100 (the half-life of plutonium-239), it is extremely difficult for humans to understand, or scientific instruments to measure, the effect of radiation throughout that period of time. The natural reaction to this temporal stretching out is to withdraw from or displace hyperobjects: send the nuclear material to Yucca or inject captured carbon into oil reservoirs. However, these quick fix solutions ignore, or repress, the environmental costs that will be shifted onto future generations. Morton finds that temporal undulation provides fodder for global warming denialists because any future projection based on scientific measurements is inherently uncertain, and scientific certainty has been rhetorically constructed as the primary justification for proof of anthropogenic global warming. Modern belief systems tend to prioritize the present and do not sufficiently account for future objects.Hyperobjects are phased because they occupy a high-dimensional space that makes them “impossible to see as a whole on a regular three-dimensional human-scale” (70). Surely humans experience tsunamis and feel radiation sickness, but those are simply “snapshots” of the hyperobject that occupies a more complex space (70). Selecting one “thin slice” of the hyperobject to analyze is just as likely to weaken our understanding of the hyperobject as it is to improve it (70). Morton uses the study of an iceberg (pictured on the front cover of the text) to illuminate phasing. Given adequate light and distance, humans can see the tip of an iceberg. However, 90 percent of the iceberg is under water. The scientific reaction to this dilemma is to move the camera underwater, but this choice distorts the part of the iceberg that sits above water, rendering a complete picture impossible. The scientist faces other choices as well. Should she move in close to the iceberg, or is there some perfect critical distance? If she gets close she may miss important context, but if she moves too far away, she misses the undulations and imperfections of the surface. Should she drill or melt part of the iceberg? If she did, she might end up knowing more about the iceberg she intended to observe, but she would have fundamentally altered the object of study in the process. Should she map the movement of the iceberg? This may tell her something about the pedigree of the object, but she can't trace back forever, and she won't ever perfectly know the future itinerary of the iceberg. None of these dilemmas deny the reality of the iceberg; rather, Morton sees them as emblematic of the failure of the modern scientific tradition. The more that modernity develops indexical signs to mark hyperobjects, the larger the “not-all set” becomes as well (78).Hyperobjects are interobjective because they constitute the mesh that floats in and around other objects (83). Hyperobjects are causal webs that leave footprints on other objects. In other words, many hyperobjects are “crisscrossing” force fields (93). Global warming leaves a footprint on the back of our neck, and endocrine disruptors leave footprints on our breasts and thyroids. As in any interconnected system, manipulation of one object has cascading effects on other parts, either changing the form of other objects or creating “gaps and absences” in the mesh (83). Humanity seeks benign substitutes (e.g., margarine for butter, or Splenda for sugar), but each of these has unpredictable effects that extend beyond itself. Importantly, the appearance of these markers only tells us about the “past of a hyperobject,” which seemingly distorts the metaphysics of presence (90). Although some scientists and philosophers chase the tail of hyperobjects, Morton argues that they are “never present” and that this end of the present lifeworld is precisely the “reaction shot” necessary to spark the radical transformation of ethics proposed in part 2 of his text (93, 95).The second part of Hyperobjects transitions from the definitional to the normative, outlining ethical, political, and social systems that account for “the time of hyperobjects” (97). The precipitous pace of environmental degradation has placed human and nonhuman objects in grave danger, a peril that is not accidental and not solely relegated to future generations. Hyperobjects shatter the contemporary lifeworld: the natural world can no longer be considered a national park that humans can observe from “behind the windshield of an SUV” or a conservation area to be preserved for future generations (127). The future is here, and it is the job of philosophers to show that this lifeworld has come to an end—there is no longer (if there ever was) a difference between substance and accident, nor a difference between the human and the natural (101). Facing fatal substances that will outlast anything resembling a close relative of themselves, humans must develop an “ethics of the other, an ethics based on the proximity of the stranger” and learn to democratically coexist with nonhuman objects (124, 121).Morton launches three poignant criticisms at modern environmental philosophy. First, he argues that environmentalism, by merely greening the existing social order, is doomed to continuously reproduce fatal substances (116). Modern environmentalism finds salvation in technologies that reproduce, or at least don't address, the fundamental dangers of hyperobjects. Although Morton does not use these examples, his criticism underscores the irony of “environmentally friendly” hybrid Hummers, corn-based biofuels, and natural-gas fracking (at least it isn't coal, right?). Sustainable capitalism, to Morton an oxymoron, merely attempts to preserve a lifeworld that is no longer with us.Second, he argues that environmentalism is too anthropocentric: it is focused on preserving human objects, often at the expense of nonhuman objects. Utilitarianism, to Morton a profoundly self-interested philosophy, attempts to protect “humanness,” which is a “fictional idea” that “ecological awareness actually refutes” (131).Finally, Morton contends that environmentalism is too focused on developing persuasive strategies (public relations) that don't radically alter the existing ontological order. Citing the inevitable failure of PR as a motivating force, Morton notes that “we need to get out the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business” (181). Humans are in denial about “their role in the Anthropocene,” so reasons (rhetoric) will not reverse their apathy. Morton implies that rational discourse has failed and that the affective domain must be awakened through the magic of art. Controversially, Morton notes that “no further proof is required” and more “reasons” actually “inhibit our responsible action, or seriously delay it” (183).Morton is deeply concerned about the apathetic right as well as the failures of the environmental left. He seeks to shatter the existing ethical framework and to pick up the pieces with a fundamental ontological transformation, in the form of object-oriented art: art that “sticks to us and flows over us,” not to make us think, but to “walk [us] through an inner space that is hard to traverse” (189, 184). As examples, he cites the sound art of Francisco Lopez and Jarrod Fowler and Robert Ashley's She Was a Visitor. These pieces “resist classification” as music yet still stimulate a contemplation (rest) that attunes humans to the nonhuman hyperobject (187). It is impossible to describe these truly postmodern works, but that is likely the point. For Morton, it is this dizzying contemplation that will help humans wake up to hyperobjects that have been, are already, and most definitely will continue beyond human existence. Postmodern art is part of the magic that Morton believes will alter the environmental behaviors that persuasive strategies have failed to change.Scholars of rhetoric and philosophy will find Hyperobjects engaging in a variety of ways. Morton is intensely concerned with denialist strategies that hyperbolize uncertainty to justify apathy toward the hyperobject of global warming. Yet, he is equally troubled by the cynicism of the left that “maps perfectly both onto the U.S. Republican do-nothing-ism and Gaian defeatism” (157). For him, the job of philosophers is to awaken humans to the fact that their lifeworld has come to an end and attune them to their nonhuman coequals (101). This conundrum requires a diminution of academic distance: academics must engage to forge an ethical system that doesn't “reduce or dissolve” nonhuman objects (157).Hyperobjects also seeks to broaden the objects of study for philosophers and rhetoricians. Instead of seeking to persuade or writing persuasion onto art, scholars are beckoned to appreciate atonal music, which allows nonhuman objects to confront us. Interestingly, Morton focuses primarily on sight and touch as the basis for his phenomenological encounters, often heavily focused on the reality of the object at the expense of understanding language as experience. However, hyperobjects don't simply deliver affect; language certainly shapes and mediates human understanding of nonhuman objects—a point Morton himself models by his intentional use of the phrase “global warming” instead of “climate change” (8). Thus, this text provides a starting point for rhetoricians and philosophers to explore the way language, undoubtedly a hyperobject itself, interacts with the interconnected mesh of objects.Morton's methodology sways “somewhat sickeningly between phenomenological narrative and scientific reason,” which is both necessary and discomforting (6). His text is focused on actually existing objects that he says have a “reality [that] is verified beyond question” (7). And his faith in the ability of science to determine some facts (the existence of global warming, the power of black holes, the influence of radiation on the body, etc.) is firm. He even draws on this faith to deny the truth of other's phenomenological experience, by criticizing the skeptics who deny global warming based on their own local experience (being situated in colder weather). However, Morton also claims that he is stuck, “unable to go beyond” first-person “situatedness” (5). Although I do not intend to deny the value of phenomenological criticism (or the scientific facts supporting the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis), there is certainly a tension between his method and results that merits further exploration.Hyperobjects also presents useful insights for scholars interested in humanist and posthumanist ethics. Morton's criticisms of environmental apathy, leftist cynicism, and global warming denialism are persuasive. Humans have spurned nonhuman objects that will be “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking” (201). And, our relationship to those objects continues to wreak devastation on the human and nonhuman world. For Morton, this dilemma requires a shattering of the human-nonhuman hierarchy, a democratic coexistence, and recognition that the being of a “paper cup” is as profound as humanness (17).If this sufficiently shatters human-centered ontology, it is not entirely clear how we should pick up the pieces. Morton proposes atonal music and object-oriented art to stimulate an object-oriented ontology, but unfortunately he provides little evidence that these strategies will change environmental attitudes. Even if such strategies generate respect for the nonhuman world, some further ethical centering will be needed. Human objects face choices daily, decisions that once made will result in the destruction of some nonhuman objects (e.g., to eat local meat or globalized vegetable produce, to drive or ride the bus to work, to breastfeed or feed with formula), and by flattening hierarchies of objects, OOO provides no template for ethical environmental action. In the face of this ethical impasse, human objects anthropomorphize nonhuman objects by writing human language onto them. We find mountains thinking, stones speaking, hammers wanting, and cigarettes demanding, and we act as if we can understand the desires of inanimate objects. Unfortunately, for those invested in OOO, this act of attributing human traits to nonhumans seems to strengthen the primacy of humanness and weaken the democratic coexistence that Morton theorizes. For rhetoricians and philosophers interested in environmental ethics, the challenge now is to develop viable ethical systems that preserve human and nonhuman life in the age of hyperobjects.

This essay performs a comparative analysis of the rhetorical dimensions of versions of the socialist anthem the “Internationale” in divergent historical contexts. Based on literature on the rhetoric of music in social movements and theories of affect and emotion, our study of two historical iterations of the “Internationale” demonstrates the differences between class-conscious and nationalist-populist mobilization of feeling. In versions faithful to working class experience, the anthem names a basic class antagonism, unites an audience in affective musical practice resonant with working class experience and aspirations, and explicitly demonstrates how reason and revolt, in the words and sounds of the song, may thunder together.

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

This paper argues that online communication products should employ item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms to equip readers with the best potential sets of information that fits their specific contexts. Many online resources are utilizing item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms which harness the decisions of users to affect their experience. Examples include the recommendation engine used by Amazon.com to help steer customers to products they might enjoy, the "Music Genome Project" used by the internet radio platform, Pandora, and various user interfaces that quickly determine the best user experience to present each individual user.

Research problem: The study attempts to study how an empowered Chinese public coped with and interpreted the environmental crisis of the ConocoPhillips oil spill and how ConocoPhillips reacted to the growing influence of social media. Research questions: In what ways did the Chinese public exercise its new power through social media in addressing the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident? How did a multinational company like ConocoPhillips act during the crisis and react to the voices of the public through new media? Literature review: Social media has caused a power shift in China by allowing the ordinary Chinese public who used to be the silent majority to expose scandals and express their opinions about crises with greater freedom. At the same time, pressure is growing on corporations to exercise social responsibility, through responding to economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has. Stakeholder theory indicates that only by meeting the needs and expectations of the individuals and groups who can affect or are affected by the firm's objectives can a firm survive and succeed. In developing countries, corporate social responsibility is characterized by a lack of systematic and institutionalized approach, with stakeholders, such as the public and community, being neglected for a long time. Methodology: Researchers conducted a thematic analysis of 932 microblog and blog entries about the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident in China that were published on leading Chinese social media websites between June 2011 to February 2013. Results and discussion: The study found that the oil spill sparked an uproar of anger and criticism in the Chinese online community. Most posts on microblogs and blogs engaged in finding the causes and laying the blame for the oil spill. The overwhelming majority of the Chinese public attributed the crisis to the faulty laws and inaction on the part of the Chinese government regulators, to ConocoPhillips, and the Chinese joint venture partner China National Offshore Oil Corporation's failure to undertake due responsibilities. In response to mounting online criticisms, ConocoPhillips exhibited little interest in engaging with the Chinese public and showed poor communication in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The study's theoretical contribution lies in combining CSR and Stakeholder theory with Discourse Power theory. Practical implications to multinational corporations seeking long-term business development in the developing country contexts, such as China, are that managers need to engage in responsive listening, actively participate in online conversations, and constantly scan the social media environment to manage its relations with the general public. Particularly, firms experiencing crises can gain the public's emotional support by communicating emotion-laden messages through social media.

Research problem: No study has explored how incorporating personas into heuristic evaluation of products, namely websites, affects the kinds of findings reported and the recommendations presented by usability evaluators. Research questions: (1) Do findings resulting from heuristic evaluations of a website without the use of personas differ from findings resulting from heuristic evaluations of the same website with the use of personas? (2) Do findings from persona-based heuristic evaluations in which evaluators develop their own personas differ from findings from persona-based heuristic evaluations in which evaluators are given personas? (3) If findings and recommendations are different, how do they differ? (4) How does the use of personas affect the evaluators' confidence in the findings of a heuristic evaluation? Literature review: First, previous research of heuristic evaluation has concluded that although heuristic evaluation is inexpensive and does not require advance planning, it has several shortcomings, including its too-intense focus on minor issues and its inability to capture all usability issues. Second, data-driven personas, which have long been a resource in user-centered design, have been suggested as a way to improve or enhance heuristic evaluation, and several studies suggest that usability professionals are indeed using personas in their evaluations. However, no empirical study has assessed heuristic evaluations that include personas. Methodology: In this exploratory study involving three sections of an advanced technical writing course, groups of evaluators conducted a heuristic evaluation of a website. Each section was randomly assigned a different condition with which they would conduct the heuristic evaluation: (a) a traditional heuristic evaluation, (b) a persona-led heuristic evaluation in which the personas were given to the evaluators, or (c) a persona-led heuristic evaluation in which the evaluators themselves created their own personas. Each group wrote a report identifying the major problems with the website and provided recommendations to solve the identified problems. The evaluators completed pretesting demographic surveys and posttesting confidence surveys. Results and discussion: This exploratory study found few detectable differences in the findings reported by groups that used personas in heuristic evaluation and groups that did not use personas. The groups that used personas were more likely to report findings related to navigation than the groups that did not use personas, while the groups that did not use personas were more likely to report findings related to design than the groups that used personas. The groups that created their own personas were more likely than the other groups to include complex issues in their reports and include language that directly references users and user needs. All groups were confident in their findings.

In this set of essays, the authors argue for the importance of affect and emotion in literacy education, teacher education, and classroom life. In the introduction, Boldt describes the authors’ shared belief in learning as happening within a landscape of relationships and emergent life in classrooms and beyond. The introduction makes clear that while the authors are writing from different intellectual traditions, they share a sense of anger about the fetishization of standardization, testing, and methods at the expense of ambiguity, improvisation, and unexpected, disruptive, and enlivening classroom relationships. In the first essay, Lewis demonstrates how emotion is regulated in a secondary English classroom and yet can never be fully regulated, giving rise to discomfort and to unexpected transformations of signs. In the second essay, Leander argues for a more emergent vision of lesson planning that begins with the body and its expression of energies and potentials in the present. In the final essay, Boldt urges that teachers be provided with opportunities to openly examine their negative emotional responses—including anxiety and, at times, aggression—to mismatches between children and what is required in a high-stakes environment. Throughout the essays, the authors enact rather than describe a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, laying their differences and their shared commitments side-by-side in the hope of creating for themselves and their readers new sets of relations and possibilities and, with those, the condition of potential for imagination and desire.

Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nature of public libraries are inseparable from questions about their public character. Historically, competing arguments about the ideal relationship between libraries and their publics have mirrored evolving technologies that affect a library’s potential content and accessibility. But today, when socially excluded populations need libraries to gain the cultural capital necessary to participate in civil society, threats to public libraries also threaten the public sphere’s viability as a way for the disenfranchised to address the state.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

Many studies have examined organizations’ use of specific types of online media, but few studies have examined how organizations generate dialogues and develop relationships by using multiple online communication platforms. This study takes an integrated approach by examining how top global organizations incorporate brand Web sites, Facebook, and Twitter to cultivate relationships with stakeholders. Its findings suggest that those particular online media are used similarly, that is, more for information dissemination than user engagement and more for one-way than two-way communication. The findings also suggest that the types of products promoted can affect the way that organizations use different online media to develop relationships.

This study tests the recognition of errors in context and whether the presence of errors affects the reader’s perception of the writer’s ethos. In an experimental, posttest only design, participants were randomly assigned a memo to read in an online survey: one version with errors and one version without. Of the six intentional errors in version one, on average, readers only noticed two errors, which suggests that readers notice some but not all errors. The ethos ranking for the writer was also statistically significant between the two versions, suggesting that the presence of errors can affect the writer’s ethos.

Review Article| March 01 2015 Bad Feelings in Public: Rhetoric, Affect, and Emotion Depression: A Public Feeling. By Ann Cvetkovich. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012; pp. xi + 278. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist. By Barbara Tomlinson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010; pp. viii + 279. $79.50 cloth; $30.95 paper.The Promise of Happiness. By Sara Ahmed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; pp. x + 315. $89.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Erin J. Rand Erin J. Rand Erin J. Rand is Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University in New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (1): 161–176. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0161 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Erin J. Rand; Bad Feelings in Public: Rhetoric, Affect, and Emotion. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2015; 18 (1): 161–176. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0161 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Translingual approaches to composition promise to nudge the field fully away from outdated concepts of linguistic diversity, replacing judgments of correctness and assumptions—about discrete languages with analyses of local, situational negotiations and pragmatic competence. Yet in fully displacing the monolingual “native speaker” with the translingual—composer, the approach replaces one linguistic hero with another—a fully competent “user” who shuttles between languages. This article seeks to extend translingualism’s—analysis of (metaphorical) language ecologies into the material surroundings of language contact situations. Drawing on scholarship on affect, vital materialism, and material—rhetorics, it suggests an empirical reorientation that diffuses attention beyond human language-using rhetors in order to account for shared rhetorical agency.

The impetus for writing this essay is dreadful despite being ordinary (all the more dreadful because its ordinary). Today, just like yesterday or tomorrow, hundreds of millions of people will not eat or eat so little that it seems as nothing to those who always have food in easy reach. I am no moralist, this is no sermon, yet the emptiness of rhetorical theory regarding hunger has begun to gnaw at me, especially since philosophical concern for the body and for materiality in rhetoric studies has only intensified in recent years. Hunger might draw the attention of rhetorical critique when public action is taken to feed the poor or when gazing on their suffering exposes capital's cruelty. In the philosophy of rhetoric, however, hunger is something of a void, so I think it is important to note, amid omnipresent food insecurity, the unmarked satiety of the rhetor's body, which is typically assumed to be a well-fed body or at least not a starving one. It is not a simple case of oversight; hunger is separated from rhetoric as a condition of understanding both and recognizing that we might begin to reckon the significance of assuming instead that rhetoric's materiality, and hence its potential, is not detachable from food so far as human bodies are concerned.“Experience teaches us with abundant examples,” Spinoza remarks, “that nothing is less within men's power than to hold their tongues or control their appetites” (1992, 106). Speech is effectively a species of appetite for Spinoza. The “or” he inserts between tongues and appetites is bothersome, though, and it is exactly this analogic separation that I want to trouble: it is wrong to borrow from the master figure of appetite, hunger, to explain rhetoric's persistence while granting rhetoricity independence from nourishment. Rhetoric (understood as a collective noun) is permanently famished, but its human agents never seem to know the want of food. But maybe they could know that want, or maybe they have, and that is what I wish to discuss. My only point, ultimately, is that an appetite for rhetoric does not deserve autonomy from hunger, given that any rhetoric is immanent to hunger and hunger is always, everywhere imminent so long as that rhetoric is enlivened by bodies that eat. The consequence of hunger's particular immanence/imminence is that it shapes rhetoricity in ways different from that of other appetites. Hunger is a distinctive, inalterable condition for humanity—it is indiscriminate in that all people are finally subject to it, and it is like clockwork, which makes it terrifying. As a result, it is also a condition of the rhetorics that humans inhabit (not to mention a condition of creatures that humans love, fear, imprison, study, and/or rely on, such as those that become our food, but I limit myself to human want for reasons of space and concision).My concern with rhetoric's hungry body is very general, but it is important to demystify things because otherwise I risk reestablishing the analogic distance I have unfairly and opportunistically attributed to Spinoza. One in eight people currently go hungry worldwide, and although the hunger rate declined from 23.2 percent in 1990–92 to 14.9 in 2010–12, 870 million people are still undernourished (UN 2013). One in six Americans go hungry, which includes children (sixteen million of them), seniors, and working adults (Feeding America 2014b). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012, 49.7 million Americans lived in poverty (Short 2012). And according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2012, 49 million Americans lived in food insecure environments distributed over 17.6 million households, of which 7 million had very low food security (Coleman-Jensen, Nord, and Singh 2013). The nonprofit organization Feeding America says that “food insecure children don't develop and grow as well as others. They may have more difficulty learning and may not do as well in school. They are more likely to get sick and are more likely to be hospitalized. The effects of child food insecurity are severe and they can last a lifetime” (2014a).Presumably these effects include diminished rhetorical capacities due to stunted affective potential and responsiveness to the world. However, beyond diminished capacity, the universality and proximity of starvation is also important to accounting for the ways that hunger and rhetoric entwine. Poverty and its concomitant food insecurity are everywhere, and if you live in the United States you can see just how much poverty is tucked in around you with a handy interactive map provided by the New York Times (Bloch, Ericson, and Giratikanon 2014). At this writing, Maine ranks third in food insecurity in the nation and has seen a 38% rise in SNAP participation since 2006 (Preble Street, n.d.). The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps) is the largest element of U.S. hunger alleviation programs. As I sit now in my house in Maine, I am surrounded by poverty, with rates reaching as high as 42 percent within nearby neighborhoods and communities. Undoubtedly, where I am a little peckish and looking forward to the fish tacos I will make this evening, someone (likely many someones) within walking distance has eaten little or nothing today and looks forward to little or nothing tonight.Hunger does not bargain, so one never comes to terms with it; hunger makes one incessant demand. Even when the demand is met, hunger cannot be banished to more than a few hours' distance and if one cannot give the body something to eat, the body will begin to eat itself. Perhaps the pitiless and unmoving character of hunger was on the mind of Ischomachus when he told Socrates “no man ever yet persuaded himself that he could live without the staff of life” in Xenophon's Economist (1897, 283). So rhetoric, at least in its traditional sense, is not more powerful than food. Over two millennia later, Norman Borlaug, the great advocate of the green revolution, made a similar point in his Landon Lecture at Kansas State. Referencing West African nations' collapse under the pressures of famine in the Sahel region, he set “flowery speeches” against crop yield: “Food is the first basic necessity…. When stomachs go empty, patience wears out and anger flares. If we're going to achieve world stability, it won't be done, I assure you, on empty stomachs” (1979, 3). The provision of food is irreducibly critical to the polis, but hunger's relation to rhetoric is hardly so singular, so either-or—indeed rhetoric is hardly so singular—as Borlaug makes it seem. Hunger and rhetoric are folded together in complex, dynamic layerings, such that is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins (Deleuze 1992, 108–9). Instead of a binary in which sustenance sits to one side and words (as a cipher for rhetoricity) to the other, food pleats rhetoric and hunger into each other. Through its growth, harvesting, distribution, commodification, hoarding, preparation, aestheticization, enjoyment, and waste, food wraps rhetoricity and hunger over and over the other's fabric. We can begin to make out the curves and layers of these dense, plaited relations by attending to foodways more carefully.There is something to be learned by following the oversimplification of hunger's relation to rhetoric to its breakpoint, however. Ischomachus and Borlaug, each in his own idiom, describe a brute, destructive relation where want of food blankets and suffocates civil discourse, leaving only suasion by physically violent means. In Spinozist terms, hunger is not affect but an affective multiplier that takes over the desire to persist in being (conatus). Hunger unleashes a terrible vitality that seeks only its cessation; an unmet need to eat amplifies anger, leaving violence as the only possible style of being. Hunger heightens our material vulnerability to the world, including ourselves, while making us less vulnerable to the well-heeled habits of human communication. Starvation is a potent, wordless appetite that supersedes the normalized rhetorics of national and international politics, an incredible motive force whose danger lies in the fact that it smothers other strains of rhetoric that may forestall such violence.Elaine Scarry's discussion of pain resonates with me here (1987). As a body in pain, the hungry body becomes monadic in a particular way, folding everything in on itself and out from itself relative to the process of starvation. Or, to the extent that rhetoric is understood as creative forces that mobilize affect, hunger is “the wild” at the heart of civility (Bennett 2002, 19), a gaunt power that both obliterates and compels other forms of invention. And in the face of this immanent/imminent “wild,” confronted with myriad, complex adaptations to hunger, the oversimplification of its relation to rhetoric gives way.Beyond the remorseless, desperate experience of starving, hunger at a distance enfolds rhetoricity in endlessly inventive ways. Memories of hunger, personally felt or collectively recalled, afford communities a place to build on. In other words, the quest to forget the aching hopelessness and danger of a lack of food becomes a stable, recursive foundation on which to project a future; we can recall the kind of lives that we lead or should lead. Farming has special value in locating the present between the past and future, then. Farmers have been repeatedly valorized as the bringers of civilization; cultivators come before culture. Jefferson wrote to Washington that farmers were God's chosen people, since in addition to minimizing war, “husbandry begets permanent improvement, quiet life and orderly conduct, both public and private” (1904, 151). Emerson wrote that farming “stands nearest to God, the first cause” in that all that is good in society follows from it (1904, 137). The first first of farming, before virtue and wealth, is food. Agriculture, fisheries, and husbandry yield a surplus of culture along with meat, grains, and dairy because they turn the power of hunger over. Its cessation not only allows for but nourishes an abundance of creative achievement, which includes yet is in no way limited to civility's political rhetorics. It is the broadest pleat in the materiality of consumption, the turning back of starvation, that typically uncovers a rhetor whose belly is full and a polis that inclusively excludes the unfed. Yet many smaller folds texture the relations between hunger and rhetoric because hunger is never turned back (it cannot be satisfied) and the unfed inclusively exclude the polis too (their unfulfilled appetite carries an unrealized commons within it).The multiplicity of rhetoric and the singularity of hunger are thus bound up in each other, and their entanglements produce divergent powers. Foodways, dependent on farming, actualize hunger both as a destructive and constructive force, flipping between danger and bounty in relation to rhetoric. In a physiocratic rendering of the pharmakon, François Quesnay argues in “Natural Right” that “the physical causes of physical evil are themselves the causes of physical good” (2003, 47). Hunger causes war and violence but as a craving that we need to satisfy, it gives life purpose. For the physiocrats, Jefferson, Emerson, and Borlaug, providing enough food precedes political economy and at the same time is the principal focus of governance, or rather hunger is a radical political economy of need that engenders civil society and that must always be tended to lest a society collapse. Whether that society thrives or falls, however, hunger persists and the cultivation of food enlivens a great many rhetorics, big and small.In short, the materiality of needing sustenance constantly animates rhetoricity because the demands of the stomach are relentless. It is not simply when we put words on the problem that hunger and rhetoric clasp each other. Rather, because we are never done feeding ourselves (or trying to feed ourselves) food production and consumption implacably yet creatively take up rhetoric in hunger and hunger in rhetoric.Enter again the many millions who are hungry as I write and you read, but instead of surrounding yourself with want, turn it about, encircling the malnourished in a world of plenty. The most general fold of hunger and rhetoric, wherein starvation stifles all other rhetorics, is too general and one sided to account for the many ways food deprivation vitalizes rhetoric. There are countless twisted, wrinkled knots of community in which famished bodies and sated bodies find themselves pressed together and yet separated by food, much as I (and maybe you) sit within minutes, likely meters rather kilometers, of hunger. We are incorporated in many relationships that turn on food—some urgent, some negligent, some exploitative, some noble—and these relations, never firmly constructive or destructive, contingently capacitate rhetoric in the plural.I will not pretend to imagine the complexity of all the relations that I feel are at stake, but it is not hard to recognize the complexity when it presents itself. The most recent appropriation of SNAP was through the 2014 Agricultural Act, which included massive farm subsidies but a reduction in food stamps (O'Keefe 2014). In fall of 2013, conservatives in the House, as is their wont, decried assistance as promoting laziness, which assumes that the experience of hunger or at least the very real threat of going hungry is a teacher of self-reliance and civic virtue (Nixon 2013). Thus it is responsible (and a form of responsibilization) to let hunger rule in many pockets and corners of communities, if not whole communities. Hunger, valued as a political technology, is actively incorporated into a rhetoric of governance not as an abstract enemy but as a material application of motive force. In contrast, the liberal argument is often that food assistance promotes self-sufficiency, so ending hunger yields civic virtue. And there are the strange debates over what people on food stamps choose to eat, whether it is junk food or health food that draws public attention. The inspection of food choices is more than a shaming exercise. It is an assessment of the hunger curriculum and what people should learn through food when they can get it. Food rationing is hunger rationing, so it is not simply about empty bellies versus full bellies but about the distribution of hunger relative to being. Rhetoric is implicated in every aspect, in many different material profiles. Hunger is a silent force of appetite that destroys or empowers other rhetorics as it enfolds them, and food is, therefore, a principal mediator of material ecologies for rhetoric. Agriculture, aquaculture, food manufacturing, and culinary traditions extend soil, minerals, water, plants, animals, and humans into one another in ways that impact the affective power of other appetites, including but not only an appetite for political “speech.” Foodways are key adaptations of the will to matter and, thus, rhetoric. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, not all things in rhetoric are rhetorical (2013, 39).If one grants that an appetite for rhetoric is not parallel to hunger but is shaped by it and that rhetoric is organized for hunger, to affect it, then perhaps the groundwork is laid for the philosophy of rhetoric to reconsider the materiality of food. At the most esoteric level that would mean an appreciation that survival is not always prior to creativity. Or, rather, creativity is not only in the service of survival, which is implicit in the too general fold of rhetoric and hunger described by Ischomachus and Borlaug and which sometimes grounds the political ontology of rhetoric's being (Nietzsche 1989). As Elizabeth Grosz explains in Becoming Undone, conatus is about art as well. Discussing the value of Darwin for philosophy, she argues that the world's biotic diversity is not reducible to natural selection. Creative forces unleashed by flowers to attract bees, for example, exceed reproductive utility. She argues that art is the “eruption of taste” within conatus and exceeds survival because it “enables matter to become more than it is, it enables the body to extend itself” (2011, chap. 8). Food is infinitely more than sustenance, and humans adapt and develop with plants and animals in complicated relations of taste, not just of practicality. Hence, inspecting the taste of those who rely on food stamps is not so strange after all, even if it is unpalatable. Food culture is one of the great pillars of creative, nonrational achievement, so even as we recognize hunger's necessity as a mother of invention, we must also understand that invention mothers necessity back. Being “of the world” we must eat, but to eat we must be “for the world” in order to cultivate the food that we need (Deleuze 1992, 26).At the most concrete level, appreciating hunger's material significance to rhetoric would mean exploring how foodways participate in material ecologies of rhetoric, folding and refolding want and satisfaction together to create relations between subjects and objects, taste and need. It would mean thinking about the rhetor's hungry body, not just his or her sated body, and how the distribution of hunger impacts the evolution of rhetorical capacities. To do that, we need to avoid assuming that people have enough to eat when we theorize rhetoricity; instead, we should assume that many do not, anyone may not, and begin to ask how hunger helps produce a given rhetoric's affective potential. More simply, we need to not ignore hunger in the polis when we think of rhetoric but see that it is all around us, in us.

The present study aims to investigate the extent to which L2 learners’ individual differences (field dependency and writing motivation) predict their retention of a teacher’s written corrective feedback (CF) in the short and in the long run. Using Ellis’s (2010) theoretical framework, the study examines the issue from cognitive and affective perspectives. Data was collected from 127 intermediate-level university students through written essays, a field-dependence/independence (FDI) questionnaire, and a writing motivation questionnaire, which were analyzed through t test, ANOVA, and multiple regression. The results reveal that there is a strong relationship between field independence (FI) style and the students’ successful short-term and long-term retention of corrections in the subsequent writings. Writing motivation, however, influences the short-term retention of CF only.

The norms of professionalization, viewed through a queer lens, are seen as a means to regulate affect and to banish queer forms of pleasure—much to the detriment of the academic profession. A queer, medievalist approach may help us with the project of building happier doctoral student selves. By looking at the indeterminancies and contradictions within medieval theories about “professions,” and by examining the queer valences of the first recorded use of the word professionalism (1856), we might open up spaces within our doctoral programs for productively “unprofessional” behavior.

Examining 200 word choice errors from Chinese students' drafts submitted to a writing center's online asynchronous tutoring program, the present study demonstrates that second language writers need help with word choice. Word choice problems, a natural part of second language learning, can negatively affect rhetorical effectiveness and readers' comprehension and evaluation. The study showed that 11% of online tutors' marginal comments related to word choice problems, among which 18% were due to translation. (Other error types were Wrong Context, Synform, Idiomaticity, Precision, and Register.) Direct corrections were the most common type of tutor comments -35%. (Other comment types were Explanation, Options, and Questions.) These numbers show that word choice errors are indeed critical, that even experienced writers rely on their first language, and tutors need more knowledge about word choice issues and how to provide instruction and feedback on them.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).

Research problem: In recent years, many businesses have become involved in internationalized projects, yet understanding the dynamics of engineering communication in virtual dispersed teams is limited. Research questions: How do the factors mentioned in the literature function in an international engineering project? Are there factors that enhance or constrain the work in an engineering setting that are not mentioned in previous studies? Literature review: Existing knowledge on the contextual factors that affect virtual international professional communication is mainly built on the study of the communication practices of students or business professionals who are not engineers. Results of that literature have identified factors that enhance communication for dispersed virtual teams (which include cross-cultural training, using appropriate communication technology, face-to-face communication opportunities, respect for partners, regularly scheduled meetings, a common language, a common discipline, and cross-cultural understandings though popular media). There are factors that challenge communication for dispersed virtual teams (which include differing cultural assumptions, differing cultural communication styles, US Government export control regulations, proximity and time issues, and differing levels of perceived power and influence). Methodology: This study involved observing international engineer meetings in the US and the UK and interviewing 19 engineers leading an international design team. The participants worked for the same international company with about half from the US and half in Great Britain. Results and discussion: Many of the factors identified in general professional communication studies held true for this context. But some features were unique to an engineering environment that the literature had not previously mentioned, including iplanning for and working with intercultural dispersed virtual engineering teams and that people need to consider many complexities of culture that affect communication practices. Because this study observed one team in the context of only two cultures, future research may determine whether these factors are more widely found in other teams, workplaces, and cultures. Future research may also determine the relative levels of influence of the contextual factors on international dispersed virtual engineering teams. In addition, the study of engineers learning to communicate in international settings may be illuminating.

In his first book, Christian Lundberg takes on the formidable challenge of rescuing Lacan for rhetorical studies. As he demonstrates in his first chapter, scholars in other disciplines have mostly neglected Lacan's profound reliance on the rhetorical idiom, while rhetoricians have deployed his theory for critical purposes without fully appreciating the thoroughgoing transformation of rhetoric it effects. Lundberg's intervention is the first sustained effort to treat Lacan's expansive, dense, and often opaque oeuvre as a fully formed theory of rhetoric. In fact, the book persuasively advances the provocative claim that Lacan pushes rhetoric in far more promising directions than the academic disciplines of rhetorical and composition studies have managed to date.A pervasive concern linking assorted Lacanianisms is the subject's knotty relationship to the social world. Even the leading exponent of Lacanian political critique, Slavoj Žižek, returns incessantly to subjectivity as the privileged locus of ideological fantasy on which political orders rely. Among the considerable virtues of Lundberg's book is that it facilitates a much-needed departure from the problematic of subjectivity by shifting the focus to what he calls the “economy of trope.” Yet this departure is also a return: Lundberg contends that Lacan's theory is deeply faithful to rhetoric's rich tradition, painstakingly recovering within its letter and spirit a cogent, systematic account of the tropological processes on which both subjectivity and social ontology depend. As a result, the book skillfully and forcefully opens productive avenues for future scholarship in rhetoric.Lundberg's argument hinges on the claim that Lacan's theory—indeed, science—of rhetoric presumes that communication, understood as the achievement of shared meaning, inevitably fails. In this, Lacan diverges sharply from both various structuralisms on the one hand and Foucauldian discourse theory on the other, since for Lacan the inherent failure of communication is not an obstacle or limit but both a prerequisite for and an effect of the psychic, social, and political efficiency of discourse. In a series of close encounters with prevailing currents in rhetorical studies, Lundberg argues convincingly that the appropriations of so-called poststructuralist, discursive and neomaterialist theories by rhetoricians err in continuing to stake themselves on the communication model.Each of these approaches in its own way presumes that the production of shared meaning is the aim of communicative practices; the differences among them lie in the way this presumption is deployed to explain rhetoric's role. In Lundberg's view, such work misses the way the impossibility of shared meaning is the generative matrix of rhetorical action. Rhetoric is essential not to achieve the fact or semblance of shared meaning but to organize an economy in which the circulation of signs conscripts subjects through affective investment whose condition of possibility is precisely the absence of shared meaning. Thus, “rhetoric is both signifying in a condition of failed unicity and a way of feigning unicity in the context of failed unicity…. Rhetorical artifice—tropes, modes of address, imaginary commitments, and the labor of investment—underwrites these practices, feigning unicity in the context of its failure” (3).Chapter 2 takes up the long-standing difficulty of defining rhetoric as a symptom of the chronic misapprehension of rhetoric as a practice of communication. Against the persistent indecision concerning rhetoric's scope and object domain, Lundberg proposes a Lacanian reformulation of the problem that sees rhetoric as neither the confluence of strategic, ornamental, and constitutive capacities of language (and other modes of signification), nor the disciplinary production of knowledge about a genus of objects defined as “rhetorical,” but as the “transcontextual logic of discourse, situated in an economy of tropes and affects that underwrites both the sign and the concrete modes of its employment” (23). This in turn means that, while the American tradition of rhetorical studies has privileged the Imaginary register, focus must shift to the Lacanian Symbolic “because … the sign is the result of artificial … of tropological connection—and … as a result, the sign is a site of affective investment” (28). Whereas “the Imaginary … houses the specific contents … that fill in symbolic forms” (30), the formal, autonomous operation of “trope is logically prior to all the operations that stem from the Imaginary” (39).Consequently, in chapter 3, Lundberg urges rhetorical critics to forego their investment in the Imaginary as the site of “the agential capacities of the orator, the audience and … the critic” (41) and focus on a conception of “speech” orthogonal to the fantasy of communication. To delineate this conception, Lundberg painstakingly works through Lacan's “schema L,” which formalizes the radically extrasubjective production of the unconscious, or “the whole field of tropological connections that is the condition of possibility for a sign to have an intelligible meaning” (52). Rather than a manageable process and medium for the production and circulation of meaning, here “speech is the site where language moves through a subject, and where the economy of signs takes up a specific material position, mode of address, and social context” (56). So understood, speech both relies on and disrupts the Imaginary register, replacing “a bilateral … reciprocally constitutive direct relation between subjects with a tripartite, asymmetrical relation of indirection,” marked by gaps within subjects as well as between them and the Imaginary objects and Symbolic processes on which they rely (62).If communication succeeds, it is not in establishing an intersubjective domain of meaning but in generating a volatile yet systematic array of meaning-effects. In view of this, Lundberg argues that Lacan rehabilitates rhetoric as a “symbolic science of forms” (71) committed to accounting for the operation of the “symbolic machine” in social life (72). What makes this machine both unpredictable and orderly is what, in chapter 4, Lundberg calls the “economy of the trope” comprising it. The figure of economy serves to differentiate the Lacanian theory of trope from those prevailing in American communication studies. For Lacan, metaphor and metonymy denote infrastructural logics of signification as such, rendering the latter fundamentally fortuitous and depriving it of the unicity it ostensibly promises. In short, the operation of trope both forecloses continuity and intentionality in signification and operationalizes this foreclosure itself as rhetorical agency “distributed across the whole economy of discourse … the subject's affective investments [and] the movement of tropes themselves” (87). Hence “An economically figured practice for reading trope can … account [for] the force of individual texts … by attending to the intertextual tropological exchanges that animate and exceed them” (87).Extending the figure of rhetorical economy, chapter 5 responds to “materialist” concerns that the expansion of rhetoric entails a reduction of reality to an effect of discourse. Lundberg points out that Lacan stipulates the existence of a world outside signification and stresses the materiality of signification itself. Among the senses of the Lacanian Real is a physical objectivity to which humans have only indirect access and which constitutes a limit on meaningful experience. Moreover, insofar as Lacanian reality is the field of experience produced by the embodiment of the signifier, it is the domain of metaxy, or the mediating function of desire that sustains the relation of nonrelation misperceived by the distinction between the material and the discursive. Understood “as studied (im)mediation, as a site of enjoyment that flows from the gap between discourse and the world,” metaxy engenders this distinction itself (105).A recursive structure of affective investment and circuitry of somatic enjoyment is thus both a cause and an effect of the gap within signification and between sign and world. Hence the general economy of trope is resolutely material, accounting for “the conditions of possibility for a specific emotion to be manifest given the specific economy of tropes that organizes [its] experience” (109). Indeed, for Lacan “affect … is itself organized for the subject by the function of the signifier,” which is in turn repressed as the former's “absent cause” (110). The body is a body insofar as its affects are captured within the signifying network, which requires affective investment to function, so that enjoyment is less about signs and their meanings than “the ways that the object or practice serves the subject in negotiating a relationship to the general economy of exchange” (114). This is a material form of labor “that underwrites signification by ‘sliding’ the signified under the signifier” (115). The science of rhetoric, then, is concerned not with the exchange, coproduction or contestation of meanings in designated contexts but with the demands imposed by the material operations of language itself. The challenge for rhetoricians is to forego the premise of the rhetorical relationship and to develop methods of analysis adequate to the task of explicating these operations and their effects in public life.With this in mind, chapter 6 shifts attention to the public as both the name of practical spaces of discursive performance and the implicit horizon of the rhetorical processes at stake in the book. For Lundberg, Lacan radicalizes the ontic experience of publicness into an ontological condition “where the subject is articulated … in relation to the whole economy of discourse” (130). Accordingly, the Lacanian gaze instantiates the subject's irreducibly “ambivalent relationship to the speech of the Other” (131), since “the signifier is both a site for the articulation of the individual subject and its passions and a kind of ‘public property’” (132). The public character of speech thus involves subjects in a tropological relation of prosopopoeia that organizes an economy of address suspended between the subject's imaginary relation to others and its relation to the abstract, autonomous logics of discourse in general. Against the premise of a complementarity between logos and pathos, Lacan draws attention to stasis, or the circuitous relation between sociopolitical commitments and affective investments that maintain social links by violating, circumventing, or eroticizing these commitments. The critical question now concerns the productive capacities inherent in the discontinuities among pragmatic, rational, affective, ethical, and formal dimensions of public discourse. To illustrate the practical consequences of reconfiguring rhetorical criticism in this way, chapter 7 undertakes two paradigmatic readings: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ illustrates the way attention to the tropological economy of identitarian public-making reconciles the apparent contradictions of evangelical discourse practices; while antiglobalization protest movements illustrate the limits of demand-driven politics that fail to register in critical accounts organized around the strategic politics of democratic resistance.Among other difficulties, The Passion raises the question of how a film that submits its audience to a sustained experience of visceral revulsion can mobilize identification, since its symbolic construction would seem undercut by its affective impact. In Lundberg's view, focusing on the film's narrative construction in the context of evangelical ideology renders its central metaphor of scourging enigmatic, not least because evangelicalism rests on a paradoxical image of a community of unconditional love secured by vehement exclusion. The solution to this interpretive conundrum lies in tracking the function of enjoyment through the economy of tropological exchange established between the film's aesthetic strategy and evangelical publicness. Accordingly, Lundberg's reading shows how “the experience of revulsion both conceals and makes acceptable the evangelical community's cathectic investment in the grotesque violence” by routing enjoyment through “a reading of secular powers as agents of evil who conspire against … the body of Christ as a whole” (163).If prevailing critical protocols underestimate this dimension of Christian evangelicalism, they overestimate the democratic potential of radical resistance movements for precisely the same reason. Focusing on the discursive logic of demands lodged against powerful elites occludes the cathectic investments in existing relations of power that such demands enact. Put simply, in their symbolic guise as address to the Other, such demands actually desire their own failure as the mechanism for cementing their position of enunciation within the symbolic order. In effect, radical antiglobalization movements evince a tropological economy designed to preserve the status quo in a way that continues to produce enjoyment for the protestors. Aiming at their own failure, they succeed at generating surplus enjoyment, buttressing the conditions they ostensibly target.Both readings succeed admirably in demonstrating both Lundberg's critical acumen and the productivity of the rhetorical vocabulary he extracts from Lacan. What remains less certain is whether this vocabulary is exceptionally suited to the interpretive challenges the objects of analysis pose, or indeed whether an interpretation that succeeds so well in reconciling their internal contradictions is fully faithful to the principle of failed unicity on which it relies. To be sure, the latter is hardly a shortcoming of the book but a question for Lacanian theory writ large; still, it remains a question rhetorical theory should entertain before staking itself on the Lacanian science of rhetoric.The postscript that concludes the book returns to the continuity between Lacanian theory and the rhetorical tradition, figuring the former as the latter's faithful heir. In particular, Lundberg considers the unexpected convergence between Lacan and Ernesto Grassi around the ontological priority of trope, as well Lacan's affinity with Aristotle's Protrepticus, which enlists enjoyment as the mechanism that makes intellection possible. The result is a “protreptic rhetoric,” figured as a science “rooted in the enjoyment of signs [that] requires rejecting both an arid structuralism and the banal reduction of rhetoric to its imaginary coordinates” (192).Lundberg's argument that Lacan offers a potentially transformative theory of rhetoric is thoroughly convincing, as is his adroit reconstruction of this theory. No doubt reframing rhetorical inquiry along the lines proposed by the book promises to yield vital new insights and to spur rewarding new interpretive strategies and research trajectories. Certainly the stress Lacan lays on the consequences of failed unicity and the irreducibility of miscommunication augurs a wholesale renovation of rhetorical scholarship. Such a project will entail confronting a crucial question: how far can the implications of Lacanian rhetoric bear to be pressed? If there is no unicity to be had, is the only alternative the feigned unicity generated through tropological exchange? Are all modes of sociality predicated on the forms of misrecognition this economy entails? Must the failure of unicity be recuperated, or can social life proceed without feigning it—and if so, how must rhetoric be rethought to account for this possibility? More radically, does the failure of unicity precede—logically or temporally—the supplements that compensate for it, or does this failure appear as a problem in need of a solution retrospectively, as a consequence of supplementary processes themselves? While such questions exceed the book's scope, it brings them helpfully into focus and will surely prove invaluable for future efforts to address them.

Problem: Technical writers rarely work on patent applications, but the typical documents writers prepare during research and development are important during patent disputes. Patent disputes are so costly that the potential for these disputes weighs heavily on the minds of those preparing patent applications. The relationship between technical documentation and the legal processes surrounding research and development need to shape a writer's documentation practice. Research question: What legal concepts do technical writers need to know when working in research and development? Key concepts: Patent prosecution is the process of obtaining a patent. Technology transfer is the communication that places an innovation into the marketplace. Patent disputes arise when a party believes its patent rights have been infringed. The work of technical writers becomes relevant during patent disputes. Two Supreme Court cases inform the process for reconstructing the meaning of patent claims during a dispute: <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">${\rm Markman \,v.\, Westview\, Instruments, \, Inc.}$</tex> </formula> and <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">${\rm Phillips \,v. \, AWH Corp. \, Markman}$</tex></formula> limits the audience who determines the meaning of a claim to the judge instead of a jury, and Phillips establishes the role written documents have in a patent dispute. The <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">${\rm Phillips}$</tex> </formula> case shows how a judge might use technical documentation to determine the meaning of a patent claim or term. From these cases, we can draw strategies for preparing technical documents. Key lessons: While impossible to know prior to a patent dispute how a document will affect the outcome of the dispute, technical communicators can adopt three strategies for preparing precise and complete documents. First, technical writers can adopt a “liminal” practice—the ability to interact as needed with different disciplines. Second, technical communicators can approach new subjects with assent, a type of seeking understood in order to fully explore a new technology. And third, technical communicators can approach writing about research and development as a technical translation practice to translate highly scientific or technical language into precise plain language. Implications to practice: By developing a liminal practice, technical communicators can build a robust documentation practice that includes the contextual nuances essential for work in patent prosecution and technology transfer.

Dear Colleagues and Friends~~This month's issue includes various genres- articles, symposium contributions, review essay, exchange, and poster page-that tap both time and space. In these collective texts, we have historical perspectives helping us understand our own past and allowing us to update our present; linkages to other fields of endeavor so as to enhance our own; connections across spaces to other sites of writing around the world; and closer looks at our own sites-hence the title of this introduction. As represented here, our field includes a capacious view, and as we expand sites of inquiry and activity, we have a more robust and complex view. In this introduction, then, I'll summarize each of these contributions before taking up two other tasks: (1) outlining the treat in store for us, in the combined September and December special issue of College Composition and Communication, we will learn from colleagues about various and diverse Locations of Writing; and (2) sharing with readers our new policy on rememberingIn our first article, Expanding the Aims of Public Rhetoric and Writing Peda- gogy, Writing Letters to Editors, Brian Gogan takes up how the conventional assignment of the letter to the editor can be located in what he calls an ap- proach to public rhetoric and writing pedagogy that is conducted according to the tripartite aims of publicity, authenticity, and efficacy. Drawing on his work with students, Gogan expands on these single-concept aims to situate them in relationships: publicity-as-condition and publicity-as-action, authenticity- as-location and authenticity-as-legitimation, and efficacy-as-persuasion and efficacy-as-participation. Gogan also argues that we should separate and emphasize the participation the letter-to-the-editor genre entails from the persuasion that may be its aspiration: when the efficacy of the letter-to-the- editor assignment is expanded so that it is understood in terms of participation that may lead to persuasion, public rhetoric and writing pedagogy embraces the fullness of the ecological model [of writing] by seeing the wide range of effects-persuasive or not-there within.Continuing recent work recovering our collective writing pasts, our next article details the experiences of several 19th century women, some of them from the U.S., making their educational way at Cambridge University. In 'A Revelation and a Delight': Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing, L. Jill Lam- berton focuses on the writing these women engaged in, especially outside the classroom, in order both to succeed in the classroom and to affect wider spheres of influence. Defining this writing as a form of collaborative peer activity foster- ing agency, Lamberton identifies three benefits accruing to her 19th century subjects: (1) use of extracurricular writing that augmented and enriched cur- ricular learning; (2) use of writing to develop social networks and circulation; and (3) use of such writing to shift public opinion, looking outside the college or university for broader audiences to voice support and agitate for change.Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., and Tito G. Nurudeen Jr. return us to the present as they consider how our writing programs can be enhanced: by adapting a legal heuristic used to determine what in the law is called impact. In The Legal and the Local: Using Disparate Impact Analysis to Understand the Consequences of Writing Assessment, these col- leagues first distinguish between inequities produced by intent from those produced unintentionally-the latter called disparate impact-before outlin- ing a three-part question-driven process that can identify such instances and work toward ways of changing them:Step 1: Do the assessment policies or practices result in adverse impact on students of a particular race as compared with students of other races? …

Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound in twentieth-century American culture that offers examples of how sound functions argumentatively in specific historical contexts. Goodale argues that sound can be read or interpreted in a manner similar to words and images but that the field of communication has largely neglected sound and its relationship to words and images. He shows how dialect, accents, and intonations in presidential speeches; ticking clocks, rumbling locomotives, and machinic hums in literary texts; and the sound of sirens and bombs in cartoons and war propaganda all function persuasively in rhetorical ecologies that contain words, images, and technologies. The book opens with an anecdote that foreshadows Goodale's basic mode of operation. FDR's iconic phrase “The only thing to fear is fear itself” loses much of its persuasive power when encountered only as words on a page. A significant aspect of its rhetorical force was Roosevelt's use of a pause after “fear” and before “is.” The silent pause invited listeners to fill in the gap with their own imagined fears and allowed Roosevelt to break this tension with a strong emphasis on “is” that focuses the audience's attention on “fear itself” (1–2). The cadence and sound of his voice was tailored to take advantage of the persuasive affordances of radio and does not translate to the page. Rather than isolate sound as an object of study in the manner of sound studies, Goodale's examples and close readings prompt his readers to integrate sound into the mainstream of rhetorical scholarship.Along with McLuhan, Goodale argues that humanities researchers have neglected “ear culture.” Following critiques of modern and Western visual bias, he locates the origin of this tendency in Plato's allegory of the cave and its reproduction in scholarship that emphasizes texts and archives. Even though twentieth-century technologies have increasingly made it possible to archive sound, most digitization projects have centered on archiving texts and images, with some of the online sonic archives being almost “as ephemeral as speech itself” (5). Texts and images are also much easier to reproduce in print journals that are still the valued venue for scholarship. And sound has failed to transcend disciplinary boundaries. While words are still central to English departments and images are still central to art departments, they are both engaged widely across many fields in a way that sound is not—sound predominantly remains the scholarly property of music departments. Even the field of speech communication, for Goodale, gave up its previous emphasis on voice and sound after the invention of television—film, television, and the internet have long surpassed the phonograph and radio as areas of interest in communication (6). While there is a growing movement surrounding sound, from Jonathan Sterne in sound studies to Joshua Gunn in communication, Goodale maintains that a significant hurdle for sound's wider dissemination across the humanities is that it is difficult to “read” in the traditional humanities sense of the term. His book sets out to show how these difficulties can be overcome. Less a theoretical treatise on sound, than a series of close readings that practice this form of sound criticism, the book seeks to show that sound can be read closely and on par with images and words.In chapter 2, “Fitting Sounds,” Goodale develops readings of recorded presidential speeches to show that a significant shift occurred in the sound of presidential oratory in the period between 1892 and 1912. Grounding these readings in the notion of a “period ear,” he culls together evidence from the language of political cartoons to verbal cues in early phonographic recordings and literary novels to public speaking textbooks to show how the mixing of dialects and accents influences presidential rhetoric. Over this period, the increase in foreign-speaking immigrants, the rising influence of labor on politics, the dissemination of recording technologies, and changing ideas of masculinity drive a shift from a theatrical or orotund style through a transitional period to a vernacular, instructional voice. The orotund style, which Goodale examines through short, close readings of the speeches of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, is modeled on Shakespearean actors and conveys a sense of elite class and power in its weightiness and gravitas. Every letter and every word is articulated clearly and heard distinctly. The style is marked by rolling r's and y's pronounced like a long i rather than ee (28). This kind of slow pacing and specific pronunciation was often needed to project to larger crowds in the less than ideal acoustic surroundings in which political speeches were often delivered. Goodale identifies a transitional, contextualizing moment marked by works such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose characters spoke in a more vernacular style, by actors such as Henry Irving, who rejected the orotund style in one of the first phonographic recordings of Richard III, and by speech teachers such as Brainard Gardner Smith, who began to advise orators to “speak as if before friends” (33). Goodale shows the turn in oratory that favored the instructional, plain style of professors through a close analysis of an early recording from Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 campaign that combined bits of his stump speech “The Right of the People to Rule” and his Progressive Party convention speech, “Confessions of Faith.” Roosevelt edited the speeches into a four-minute recording that was intended to reach broader audiences in the home and the saloon. Roosevelt fails to trill his r's, fails to pronounce every consonant and syllable, and speaks in the key of C (ascending and descending along the scale), in an attempt to mimic popular music, much of which was written in that key. The changing historical context created certain “sonic expectations” among public audiences that prompted Roosevelt to become the first president to sound like the people, providing Goodale with evidence that persuasively demonstrates the significance of sound in Roosevelt's recordings.Chapter 3, “Machine Mouth,” focuses on the quintessentially modern sounds of the clock and the locomotive to examine how sound can pierce or fragment identity and transform into a “sonic envelope” that protects and strengthens identity and community. What began as a “war of the working class against the clock” is taken up and celebrated by modern artists and composers and eventually turns into the accepted ambient sound of modernity. Pre–WWI artists, writers, and composers, embrace the deterritorializing of modern noise. Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque paint with sharp staccato lines that run through their subjects, fragmenting them into multiplicities. Goodale reads this as imitating the sharp sound of modernity and its effect on listeners. Braque's Woman with a Guitar (1913) exemplifies this technique, featuring lines cutting through the figure that connote the lines of a musical staff or the strings of a guitar. Futurists such as Carlo Carra and Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti challenge visual artists and poets to render sound and noise through movement, vibration, and color. Carra sees sounds as always “freed from their origin” (58) and uses techniques such as acute angles, oblique lines, and subjective perspectives to translate these sonic sensations into images. Umberto Boccioni observes that “an object moving at speed (a train, a car, a bicycle) appears in pure sensation in the form of an emotional ambience, which takes the form of horizontal penetrations at acute angles” (58). However, this cultural work serves to familiarize and domesticate these sounds, which produces “sound envelopes.” Goodale argues that futurist poet Marinetti's attempts to imitate the ear's ability to hear simultaneous sounds from multiple directions anticipates Hitler's orations. Marinetti's writing is intentionally disturbing, violent, and chaotic. But rather than fragmenting the self, Hitler used “the sound of his voice, his mechanized armies, and the crowd to unify a massive group into a single body politic” (61). Hitler uses the microphone, loudspeaker, and radio to envelop his listeners in sound. Vocal domination and the manipulation of applause create a comforting sonic envelope. Triumph of the Will, for example, uses microphones, martial music, cheers, church bells, and Hitler's amplified voice to “make an incredibly persuasive aural experience, one that bathed listeners in an impermeable sonorous envelope” (64). Adapting to these initially jarring modern sounds, audiences recompose them into a soundscape that creates identification rather than disrupts identity—in Hitler's case with disastrous results. Goodale examines a number of sonic artists up through bluesman Bukka White's integration of locomotive sounds into song to show how this “period ear” transforms over time—modern sound starts as jarring assault and becomes ambient soundscape. Radio plays a key role in this transformation because listeners can control the volume, turn to stations that align with preestablished identities, place the radio in familiar environments such as the home or church, and place the radio at the center of a sonic envelope rather than experiencing a sonic assault from all sides.In chapter 4, “The Race of Sound,” Goodale examines sonic persuasion even more directly, showing how tropes related to race were eventually used to upend mainstream sonic segregation. This chapter focuses on music cultures of the interwar period and the ways musicians collaborated directly and indirectly in order to navigate the record industry's racialized genre categories and eventually rearticulate them. Goodale provides close readings of a recorded oral history from ex-slave Phoebe Boyd, a radio episode of Amos and Andy, and Billie Holiday's recording of “Strange Fruit.” Because sound recordings were still dominant in this pretelevision era, determination of race often had to be made through voice, which is more rhetorically malleable than bodies, problematizing the commonplace that voice is a truer reflection of the self. The heights of audio technologies—phonograph and radio—made “sonic passing” through vocal and musical style a significant rhetorical strategy (78), and musicians regularly upended segregation by performing together in clubs and studios and imitating each other's styles. The chapter is awash in examples, but the focus on Holiday directly links sonic persuasion to the metaphor of coloring: color as skin, as tone in music or sound, and as rhetorical trope (97). Following Cicero and Seneca, Goodale sees tone as casting “light or darkness on events, facts, and personalities,” coloring listener's interpretations of an argument (97). “Color” is a verb that connotes change; it conveys the idea of influencing or distorting perception that isn't limited to the visual. In 1933, Holiday joins an integrated group put together by Benny Goodman in which she is prompted to sing “straight” or in a white style, because of the sonic expectations of the time and the need to “market race” (92). But by 1939's recording of “Strange Fruit,” her signature color/ing came front and center. Holiday took her style into the antilynching protest song in order to color the listener's perceptions just as FDR did with his speeches. Goodale writes: The south's purported goodness, for example, gets an ironic treatment when Holiday twists phrases like “sweet and fresh” while eliding “gallant” into something sonically less than a full word…. Her intonation of “sudden”… is rapid, thus turning the word into an example of itself. When she forces out the word bulging, she imitates with her voice the visual appearance of something being forced outward. The word breeze is elongated, and the letter b in blood drips from Holiday's lips like the life force of the victims she describes. When Holiday sings drop her voice briefly ascends then descends in a long glissando. At the end of the dragged out drop, Holiday's vibrato sonically mimics the tension of the long rope bouncing at first then quivering, then remaining still. Her voice has gained in intensity until this moment but then fades out, suggesting that it is at this point in the song when the lynching has occurred and life has ended. (99–100) She renders the words through a form of sonic persuasion that colors them in sounds that conflate the multiple meanings of the term—race, sound, and influence—creating a sonic envelope that colors the listener's experience.In Chapter 5, “Sounds of War,” Goodale concludes his analyses with an examination of sound in the cold war period. He analyzes sonic manipulations in cold war propaganda, specifically the ways that civil defense sirens and the sounds of dropping bombs were used to greater and lesser effects. Goodale looks at the educational film Duck and Cover's misguided use of the siren, which is intended to ease fears by teaching preparedness but ends up amplifying those fears; Hollywood's use of diving bombs in the Roadrunner cartoons, which actually succeeded in alleviating fears of bombing; and the persuasive impact of sonic manipulation in President Johnson's “Daisy” campaign ad from 1964. While the sound of the air raid sirens pierced the audience's sonic envelope, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons turn the sounds of war into comic familiarity, enveloping the listeners in a safer aural environment. In addition to providing his typical contextualization that places creator Chuck Jones as a member of Hollywood's left, Goodale offers a close reading that centers on the Doppler effect. Christian Doppler actually identified the effect using light, noticing that as an object approaches you its light waves are compressed and shift toward the higher visual frequency, blue light, and that as it moves away it shifts into light waves that are stretched into the red end of the spectrum. Christoph Ballot first tested the theory with sound, having trumpeters play on a moving train. Moving toward the listener the sound waves are compressed into the higher frequencies, and moving away they are stretched into the lower frequencies where the sound correspondingly moves down the musical scale in pitch (118). Goodale notes how this materiality of sound operates rhetorically in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons: It is a sound from the perspective of a particular listener: the listener away from whom the bomb travels. These are the sounds produced by a culture that has, since 1812, bombed others and not been bombed itself. Listen to a war film in Germany, and you are likely to hear a very different sound; the sound of something falling toward the listener has a gradually ascending or constant high-pitched scream, not an almost musical, falling whistle. The sound of the falling bomb that Jones made famous in the 1950s is the sound perceived by people who are bombers and not the bombed. It is the sound of survival, not of death. (118–19) The listener enthymematically fills in the phenomenological sonic position of survival, which is reinforced by Wile E. Coyote's continued survival after every pratfall. This kind of enthymematic identification is central to Goodale's chapter and analyses. In his discussion of America's use of soundless bombing videos during the Gulf War, he draws on Kathleen Hall Jamieson's concept “empathematic,” which combines enthymeme and empathy, filling in the argumentative warrants and identifying with the subject positions the argument offers. But the lack of sound in the grainy, video-game-like propaganda videos left American audiences “little possibility of stepping into the shoes of the Iraqis and completing the argument about the real effects of bombs” (127). The Iraqis had been turned into caricatures that survive rather than humans being bombed and thus worthy of empathy.Since Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound, readers in philosophy will find smaller amounts of theoretical development and readers in rhetoric will find a reliance on a relatively traditional sense of rhetoric. Rhetorical concepts such as the enthymeme and identification are predominant in Goodale's examples, and he adopts a relatively traditional model of interpretation based on historical context and close reading, his goal being critical awareness. What is exciting about the sonic turn for many is the potential to develop newer rhetorical concepts and theoretical models out of engagements with sound. While Goodale hints at this potential, his interpretive practice stays within relatively well-recognized territory.1 But it is important to acknowledge what is significant about book on its own terms. Just as it became clear in the late 1990s that we could no longer talk about cultural studies without digital technologies, since culture was becoming so intimately tied to the digital, Goodale makes the case that in the twentieth century we can't talk about rhetoric without sound, since persuasion has been so intimately tied to the sonic. For a broader readership in communication or composition, the book provides a persuasive rationale for acknowledging how sound potentially impacts all acts of persuasion. Sonic Persuasion makes the case for opening the field to a wide array of engagements with sound, and while it doesn't always take us to these diverse places and methods—affect beyond meaning, engagement beyond interpretation, method beyond close reading and historical context—it does provide clear disciplinary grounds for these pursuits, making it difficult to neglect the sounds that fragment and envelop everyday acts of persuasion and the slickest media manipulations.

While grand claims have been made for the power of literature, there is a dearth of experimental research in English education examining the effects of reading literature—and specifically young adult literature—on students’ attitudes and moral development. Little work of any kind has been done on the efficacy of literary interventions in reducing adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. In response, this study examined the capacity of a dialogically organized, reader response–based literary unit focused on the young adult novel Speak to reduce adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. An experimental design was used with eighth-grade English language arts students in seven classes that were randomly assigned to treatment or control. Rape myth acceptance was measured using the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (Burt, 1980) and a researcher-created scale, the Adolescent Rape Myth Scale (ARMS). Results revealed that girls had significantly lower levels of pretest rape myth acceptance than boys, that intervention significantly lowered participants’ rape myth acceptance, and that there was no backlash to treatment. Factor analysis revealed a two-component solution for the ARMS representing common rape myths; further analysis found that treatment was more effective in reducing the component She Wanted It than the component She Lied. The results demonstrate the instructional value of young adult literature, support the use of reader response–based dialogic instruction, and show it is possible to effectively address topics such as rape at the middle school level. I argue that future research should examine whether similar literary units can affect attitudinal constructs such as homophobia, tolerance of bullying, and attitudes toward disabilities. The potential marginalization of this type of literary instruction due to current educational reforms is also discussed.

English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students’ lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents’ digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt experience of time. The data analyzed in this article come from a 12-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. The overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and the microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students’ literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents’ affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students’ bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.

Hospitals have encountered significant changes since implementing the hospitalist model. The changes have been most prevalent in the communication between patients, primary care physicians, specialists, and hospitalists. This comparative case study examines hospitalists’ and patients’ perceptions of communication challenges. During interviews, hospitalists reported that most of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. But during group sessions, hospitalists reported that less than one third of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. A comparison of patients’ and hospitalists’ perceptions demonstrates that there are critical gaps in patient education that affect patients’ care and their trust in their caregivers.

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by “The Leisure and Cultural Service Department,” the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in “an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China” (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum’s multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland’s theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the “affective dimension of politics.”