Knight, Aimée. Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2022; 125 pp.: 9781646423149, $19.95 (pbk) Universities have increasingly demonstrated a desire to develop collaborative relationships with members of their local community. The question becomes how to ethically develop these community partnerships in a way that is mutually beneficial… Continue reading Review: Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative ChangeReview:

In Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie Martin asks the mind-boggling question of the 2016 election: How did Donald Trump secure the evangelical voting bloc that catapulted him to victory? After the release of the recordings of Trump admitting to sexual violence and assault against women, his candidacy was presumed to be doomed. However, as Martin indicates, Trump won the presidency largely because of the evangelical vote. The evangelical church body, which prides itself on strong morals and family values, supported a twice divorced philanderer who admitted to sexually assaulting women. In the wake of the 2016 election, many were confounded by this reality.To wrestle this issue, Martin conducts a “digital rhetorical ethnography” on the narratives of the evangelical church. She analyzes recorded online sermons from across the nation, transporting herself into church pews via the internet. What Martin discovers is a remarkably consistent and persuasive rhetoric of emotional narratives that allowed Trump to become the unspoken yet preferred nominee of the evangelical church. Further, Martin's research gives voice to a new, eXvangelical movement that has distinctly feminist roots rising out of the church post-2016.In her initial chapters, Martin develops a baseline for understanding the evangelical lens. This starting point includes founders’ rhetoric, the “Great Commission,” and the rhetoric of former President Ronald Reagan, all of which are leveraged to create a sense of evangelical Christian nationalism. Founders’ rhetoric follows the logic that founding fathers were Christian; therefore, God is and should always be at the center of the American experience. This God-centered-in-country belief, combined with the Great Commission (the Biblical command to “Go and make disciples of all nations”) empowers evangelicals to declare themselves rightful heirs to the blessings of America as intended by the founding fathers. Converting others to faith is thus the path to the American promised land and ultimately eternal life.Martin also discusses the church's use of the rhetoric of Reagan, whose message of protecting liberty, promoting hard work and family values, and maintaining a small government seemingly aligns with the founders’ rhetoric of God-centered-country and blessings. The pastors’ use of Reagan's claims evoked a sense of crisis, that the nation was on a dangerous path, and that Christians must fight to maintain the nation's greatness and prosperity while preventing moral decline. This message generated a longing for better times, for the ideal and imagined past state of static gender roles where race was subdued or even hidden. It created a deep desire to return to the family values that were believed to have been eroded by the civil rights movement and the old-fashioned morals that were believed to have been corrupted by Hollywood. This rhetoric also created a longing for evangelicals’ celestial home, where there would be no more sin, pain, or loss. Martin explains how such messaging helped solidify the intertwining of the founders’ rhetoric and the Great Commission, encouraging Christians to fight for their embattled church, their rightful American blessings, and their heavenly home.Martin claims that this foundational narrative creates an “esprit de finesse” that pastors repeatedly used in their sermons to inspire “true” believers to action, laying the foundation for the battle cry to “Make America Great Again.” Martin is careful to emphasize that no churches explicitly demonstrated support for either candidate or party; many of the pastors provided disclaimers such as, “I'm not going to tell you who to vote for . . . ” (80), or simply encouraged an “open embrace for political open-mindedness” (107), while using the pulpit as a platform to advance a moral-national ideology. Martin identifies distinct themes in these sermons: American exceptionalism, nostalgia, and active passivism.Throughout the sermons, Martin explores the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the church's embrace of America as the promised land. In their stories, pastors reinforce that simply existing in America is a blessing, and this birthright blessing requires good stewardship of your American bounty, including congregants’ time, talents, and treasures. Martin discusses how this storyline frames good Christians as those who make good choices and, in turn, make good Americans. To expound, good Christians are hard workers who live responsibly in a land of unlimited opportunity. This romanticization of hard work, frugality, and personal responsibility offers great reward both on earth and in heaven. It also sets up a distinct “other” against which good Christians (good Americans) must battle. This “other” is a group of lazy, fraudulent, non-Christians who abuse the system and take handouts from the government, thus stealing from the pot of American riches that belong to deserving Christians. This framework, without explicitly using the words, rhetorically aligns with the GOP's theoretical support of small businesses, personal responsibility, small government, and American opportunity for those who deserve it. By preaching this philosophy, pastors tacitly endorsed the Republican nominee as the presidential candidate.Martin also highlights the concept of nostalgia, specifically noting that pastors invoked the rhetoric of Reagan to remind white, low to middle class congregants of perceived better times. Martin recalls how Barack Obama's presidency, which inspired hope and change, was largely rejected by evangelicals. To evangelicals, gay marriage, protests against police brutality, and Hollywood's support of the liberal agenda were all signs of the nation's loss of Christian values. Martin describes how stories told in sermons framed recent decades as a period of slow social and moral decline: the 50s sustained a loss of innocence; the 60s a loss of authority; the 70s a loss of the meaning of love; the 80s a loss of values; the 90s a loss of faith; and with the Great Recession, the 00s brought a loss of security (90). Leading up to the 2016 election, pastors of megachurches invoked a rhetoric of nostalgia while telling stories that vilified hope and change and created a desire for a return to the safety of the past. A genuine loss of financial security, along with the narrative of moral decline and a call to return to better times created a sermonic storyline that America somehow needed to be made “Great Again.”The final rhetorical concept Martin analyzes perhaps provides the most insight. She calls this concept “active passivism.” In its simplest terms, active passivism can be described as a call to vote (active) while not worrying about the results (passivism). Martin writes how pastors used this frame to encourage voting as a civic duty and moral responsibility. Voting was situated as honoring the nation and those who have fought for freedom (a nod to the military, to Christian martyrs, and to Jesus Christ, himself). She shares how pastors acknowledged dislike for both candidates yet encouraged thorough review of the party platform in preparation to vote in alignment with one's faith. None of the pastors suggested that their rhetoric created a pre-disposition to one party over the other; all the pastors, instead, echoed that God is in control, so ultimately the election outcome does not matter. A phrase commonly used across the sermons told parishioners that they are in the world, but not of it, indicating that America matters, but not as much as heaven, their true home. This messaging gave congregants permission to vote for Trump, while explicitly denying the church's support for either candidate. Martin explains that, through active passivism, evangelicals were encouraged to actively use their agency by participating in the election, while effectively telling them to be passive about the results of their collective vote. This rhetoric ultimately absolved Christians from any responsibility for their voting decision.In her final chapter, Martin recalls the last weeks of the 2016 campaign when the notorious tapes that revealed Trump's bragging about physical violence and sexual assault were released (147). She notes that in response to these tapes, most churches in her study stayed relatively quiet or merely suggested forgiveness since the incident had happened in the distant past. The church's failure to address the GOP nominee's admitted assault prompted an unexpected response from a different pulpit that gave voice to a group within the church in a new and distinct way. Martin outlines how prominent Christian women such as Rachel Held Evans, Jen Hatmaker, and Beth Moore began to call out the immorality of the Republican nominee's character and the lack of courage shown by the pastors of the evangelical church by their obvious rhetorical silence.Martin provides examples of the messaging from the Christian women's platforms: Rachel Held Evans, a speaker and blogger, specifically targeted Trump's rhetoric against the oppressed and his exploitation of evangelicals to advance his own self-interests and personal gain.1 Jen Hatmaker, a well-known speaker and author, went beyond targeting Trump and directly labeled evangelical men as complicit in perpetuating sexual abuse by refusing to denounce it.2 Beth Moore, a Bible studies author, pushed further still by publicly demanding accountability for the transgressions of the church.3 In contrast to their rhetorical silence, Moore asked male church leaders to be forthright about structures and systems within the church that allowed for potential abuses, including “a culture that allowed women to be demeaned in the name of submission and abused in the name of obedience” (151).While Christian women leaders had previously exercised contained agency within the constructs of the church, women like Evans, Hatmaker, and Moore stepped outside of their lanes to bring new truth to the conversation. As Martin shares, their courage in explicitly denouncing evangelical systems and messages of misogyny disrupted the privilege of the church and the leaders within it. In addition, Martin points out how their bravery prompted social media discussions about sexual abuse both within and outside the church. Through their discourse, a new storyline emerged, that of suffering at the hands of patriarchy. Martin credits Hannah Paasch and Emily Joy as launching the #ChurchToo movement on social media, a movement that gave permission to those who experienced sexual assault within the church to share their stories. The sharing of these stories generated unification around a once-silent suffering, effectively challenging the evangelical misogyny deeply coded within the Christian church. Women online began to amplify the voices of those who had previously been voiceless—and not just the unborn—sparking what is now being called the eXvangelical movement, where women are driving a new rhetorical narrative while reclaiming, or renouncing, their faith.Telling the story of the collective message of the digital church leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Martin describes both the thematic pastoral rhetoric that has carried the evangelical church over the last fifty years and the emergence of an evolving narrative of evangelical feminism. She deftly synthesizes how the carefully crafted megachurch messaging moved congregants toward the Republican party without explicit partisanship. She illuminates how pastors both relied upon and exploited the beliefs of evangelicals by framing their messages in American exceptionalism, nostalgia, and active passivism. This layered rhetoric encouraged a faith-based unified calling to return the nation to its moral standing no matter the cost. It absolved evangelical Christians from their moral electoral responsibility, effectively bringing theology into the ballot box. Yet, as Martin uncovers, when asked to stand alongside Christian women who vocally condemned the Republican party nominee and his admission of sexual assault, the church stayed silent. This silence gave birth to a progressive feminism that emerged from the fray of the evangelical church. This feminism, born largely of the voices of women who courageously used their agency to move beyond the confinements of active passivism and act for the greater good, has sparked a movement that will continue to challenge not only the misogyny deeply coded within the evangelical church, but also the Trump-era rhetoric of the “alt-right.”4

How can it be possible for disempowerment to be mistaken for empowerment?Isn't the dichotomy between the two abundantly clear?Erec Smith thinks not.Smith's ethos as a Black professor of rhetoric and composition places him in a unique position to critique anti-racist pedagogy.It is not his perspective that racism is not present in the academy: far from it.He has been the recipient of prejudice and discrimination from his graduate work all the way to his teaching.In his book, Smith includes personal experiences and anecdotes that help to illustrate his perspective.As a Black rhetoric and composition instructor in the majority White institution of York College of Pennsylvania, Smith has experienced these issues firsthand and has found that anti-racist pedagogy alone, which he argues can lead to a lack of academic rigor, is not necessarily the appropriate answer.Smith's main argument is that anti-racist pedagogy in rhetoric and composition often inadvertently disempowers students by ignoring important aspects of empowerment theory.This pedagogy instead encourages marginalized students to embrace their positionalities as the center of all arguments and to fall back into positions of victimhood.Smith explains that this "victim framing" creates "disempowered entities in need of enlightenment instead of empowered agents with selfefficacy and a desire to broaden the interactional and behavioral components of empowerment" (88).This victimhood allows students to escape from proper academic scrutiny which, in turn, reduces academic rigor.In his introduction, Smith begins his critique with a vignette in which W. E. B. Du Bois recounts an experience in a composition class at Harvard.In his first essay for that class, Du Bois had railed against racist issues present in society at the time and had let fly his own colloquial grammar and syntax.This first effort was met with a failing grade.From this experience, Du Bois noted, "[he] realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax" (Smith xix).Du Bois realized it was imperative to adapt to "standard English, " or what Smith prefers to call the "language of wider communication" (LWC) (5), rather than insist on communicating in the vernacular he grew up speaking.Using Du Bois as an example of code switching, Smith addresses the present climate of code meshing taught in many quarters of the rhetoric and composition field.According to scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Asao Inoue, and others, rhetoric and composition instructors who require their students of color to adapt to the LWC engage in a form of racism because this adaptation automatically alienates students' home dialects.As such, they propose that students in rhetoric and composition should be encouraged to inject their writing with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as well as other dialect forms.In writing and speaking this way, anti-racist scholars argue, students embrace

Preview this article: Review: Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century: by Beth L. Hewett, Tiffany Bourelle, and Scott Warnock; Administering Writing Programs in the Twenty-First Century: by Tiffany Bourelle, Beth L. Hewett, and Scott Warnock., Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32591-1.gif

Preview this article: Review: Working with and against Shared Curricula: Perspectives from College Writing Teachers and Administrators Edited by Connie Kendall Theado and Samantha NeCamp., Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/4/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32590-1.gif

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays of prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines the long-term importance and impact of the 1982 MLA volume The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing edited by James J. Murphy.Dedication: This Rhetoric Re-View essay is dedicated to the memory of James J. Murphy, who edited The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing and, in addition to his impressive scholarship, served for many years on the editorial board of Rhetoric Review. Professor Murphy was 98 years old when he passed away shortly before Christmas 2021.

Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners’ school-relevant language resources that are of high utility to understanding analytical texts across content areas. After a brief review of the relations between mid-adolescents’ language and their school reading and writing proficiencies, I offer illustrative examples of individual differences in middle-schoolers’ analytical writing and CALS. I argue, on the basis of recent but extensive empirical evidence, that without understanding and addressing the immense variability in the language resources that students bring to school and the language demands of reading- and writing-to-learn tasks and texts, schools run the risk of maintaining and even exacerbating the inequalities that exist in the larger society.

This study reviews the current underlying theories relevant to writing centers as well as the research methods being used in the early 21st century. The first section covers the theories used in writing center scholarship from the 1980s onward based on influential articles and texts. The second section covers published research both in the Writing Center Journal (WCJ) and other publications from 2010 onward and discusses the current state of research methods. Readers may not be aware of some of the fine divisions of theory; for example, the distinction between collaborative learning and social constructivism. Researchers may benefit from the overview of methods, which covers the most popular and current methods (survey and textual analysis) and promising but little-published research methods, such as ethnography. Keywords : collaborative learning, social constructivism, writing as a social process, Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, cognitivism, feminism, transfer of learning, threshold concepts, tutoring encounter, social and environmental justice, survey, mixed methods, textual analysis, descriptive studies, theoretical research, archival research, quasi-experiment, quantitative methods, narrative inquiry, grounded theory, case study, usability, ethnography

Writing center scholarship has focused extensively on how to consult with non-native English speakers but often fails to acknowledge the emotional dimensions of consulting with struggling English Language Learners (ELL). Writing center practitioners can more effectively assist ELL writers and support the emotional dimension of their writing experiences by allowing for more discussion of peer tutor techniques that foster a positive view of writing and support foreign language anxiety. Addressing the challenges faced by ELL students can help create more inclusive and comfortable learning spaces. A review of scholarship suggests future writing center scholarship should include more research on the appropriate and manageable peer tutor techniques for combating biases and encouraging ELL students to serve as writing center tutors. Keywords : English language learners, writing center, emotional states, foreign language anxiety, emotional labor, peer-tutor techniques

The volume consists of two chapters -an introduction and a conclusion -by the editors and seven case studies from different countries:

In Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication, Dr. Laura Gonzales proposes a radical rethinking of the motivations, methods, execution, and interpretation of multilingual research in technical communication. Gonzales rejects classical technical communication models, which posit the technical communicator and translator as mere transmitters of information. Perhaps more important, Gonzales rejects current common practices in multilingual research and their dismissive assumptions (whether implicit or explicit) about speakers of languages other than English, typically in communities of color or the Global South.

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey Robert M Royalty Jr. Bruce McComiskey, Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 231 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-09015-3. This book is a detailed rhetorical analysis of six of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran. Each chapter, focusing on one or two of [End Page 204] the texts, employs a different rhetorical strategy for analysis based on what McComiskey has identified as the "rhetorical ecology" of the text, incorporating the changing material, discursive, and historical elements of the Qumran community rather than only the more static rhetorical situation of each text. The chapters proceed in a roughly historical order. The book achieves its aims of introducing rhetorical scholars to the sectarian scrolls and, with its "case study" approach, religious scholars to new strategies of rhetorical analysis. Key points are the emphasis on rhetorical ecology as an interpretive lens and the argument for hermeneutics/rhetoric in chapter 6. While McComiskey places the diachronic rhetorical development of these texts in the social and political history of the Qumran community, this is a rhetorical, not historical, study. The Introduction argues for the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls not only for Second Temple Jewish history but also for analysis by rhetoricians, given the relative paucity of rhetorical studies of the texts and their evolving rhetorical ecologies. Chapter 1 analyzes the early epistle from the future leader of the Essene Qumran community to the high priests of the Jerusalem Temple called Miqṣat Ma'aśeh ha-Torah, "Some Precepts of the Torah" (4QMMT, following Dead Sea Scroll convention for identifying texts by cave number and site, here Qumran). 4QMMT uses the rhetorics of identification, distinction and persuasion to distinguish the two parties' positions and to try to convince the Temple priests of the validity and urgency of Essene views on the impurity of the Temple. The rhetorical ecology of the text is as important as the rhetorical situation: "only the understanding of texts as situational and ecological will further our understanding of ancient texts such as 4QMMT" (46, McComiskey's italics). The rhetorical ecology of the community shifts dramatically in the next 50 years as the letter does not achieve its persuasive goals. The Essene community, under the leadership of the "Teacher of Righteousness," the putative author of 4QMMT, dissociates from the Jerusalem hierarchy and indeed all non-Essene Jews, founding a desert community outside of Jerusalem by the Dead Sea. Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, chapter 2 then analyzes the foundational Rule of the Community (1QS), a performative text using infelicitous speech acts to condemn the Jerusalem authorities and felicitous speech acts to form the Yahad, or congregation, as the Essene community referred to itself. The document ends with a serious of curses, which McComiskey labels as preventing infelicitous speech acts within the initiated community, although he parses the curses, treating the ones for material actions in chapter 4, weakening his analysis. Chapter 3 then analyzes the dissociative rhetoric of the Damascus Document, a text discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost 40 years before copies were found at Qumran, hence called CD. Although the origins and purposes of CD remain less clear than 1QS, the text addresses members of the community who live in "camps" or communities among non-Essene Jews away from Qumran. Using Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric on "the dissociation of concepts," McComiskey shows how CD addresses the incoherence of Essenes living among Jews who [End Page 205] are not "real" Jews.1 He shows how CD divides central concepts of Jewish identity, such as humanity, Israelite, remnant, and Essene, into "real" and "apparent." This rhetorical strategy resolves incoherence for "real" Essenes living among "apparent" Israelites. Chapter 4 turns to the central theme of ritual purity at Qumran. McComiskey chooses two texts focusing on purity, the Purification Rules (4QTohorot A, B) and the Temple Scroll (11QT), which he analyzes using material rhetoric, an alternative to representational approaches to models for words. The symbolic material actions of inspiriting...

Reviewed by: Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts by Allison Glazebrook Katherine Backler Allison Glazebrook, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021. 240pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-2441-7. This book offers a short, focused, thoughtful analysis of how prostitution functions rhetorically in Athenian legal speeches. In each of the five chapters, Glazebrook takes us through a forensic speech in which what she [End Page 209] calls "sexual labor" is at issue and analyses its rhetorical strategies to draw out ways in which Athenians used the figures of "sexual laborers" to articulate and negotiate social values. Each chapter's argument develops the last. The first chapter discusses Lysias 4, a dispute between two men over a prostituted woman they allegedly agreed to "share" but whom one is using exclusively. Glazebrook shows how the speaker repositions the unnamed woman from sex-object to subject, a manipulative influence on his opponent and the trial. The second shows how Isaios 6's portrait of a prostituted woman named Alke suggests the ramifications of her alleged influence by moving her from brothel to tenement-house to household, Peiraieus to Kerameikos to astu, playing on Athenian anxiety about "concepts of oikos and polis and … the roles of enslaved persons, non-Athenians, and even women in these places" (49-50). The third examines the more dramatic (almost panhellenic) mobility of Neaira in Against Neaira, and her more serious supposed threat to the Athenian family, citizen body, and religion. The fourth, on Lysias 3, changes focus to prostituted boys and men, considering how the speaker uses Plataian teenager Theodotos to mark out acceptable and unacceptable expressions of male homosexual desire and behaviour. The fifth, on Aischines's Against Timarchos, uses male prostitution to work through what it means to be a decent, democratic, Athenian citizen—or not. Sexual Labor is refreshingly clearly written. Glazebrook briefly but helpfully explains relevant technical points (for example, on legal processes) and key concepts (like the important but fuzzy ideological distinction between pederasty and prostitution), avoiding over-simplification and acknowledging problems and contradictions. She will offer a variety of scholars' opinions and either pick out the one closest to hers or identify the "bottom line," for example, on what it means to "commit hubris against one's own body" in Aischines 1 (140). The description of Athenian courts (9-13) offers a dynamic, basic introduction to Athenian law but also considers the law-courts as a performance context. The book is useful on terminology, demonstrating that orators use words like pornē, hetaira, and pallakē not so much to denote categories as to evoke a set of connotations to make a point. For example (37), "At two key points [in Lysias 4] … when the speaker accuses the opponent of feigning his injuries and when he asks for the jurors' pity, he refers to [the woman] as pornē (4.9, 19)" which is "both degrading and inaccurate": seemingly she "has been living with the opponent as his personal hetaira or even pallakē (long-term partner)." Further, she argues that the avoidance of the labels pornē and hetaira for Alke in Isaios 6 unmoors her from fixed place-associations (brothel for pornai; oikos for wives and pallakai; symposion for hetairai), allowing her to move within the cityscape, transgressing and disrupting the social order. Glazebrook makes her argument particularly effectively on p. 150 where, through and informing her analysis of Against Timarchus, she shows that as Aeschines "uses kinaidos as a lifestyle and identity for Demosthenes, [he] employs pornos to indicate a lifestyle and personality for Timarchos. His concern is not to show that Timarchos has practiced a profession—no concrete proofs … are offered—but to show that he embodies an identity." [End Page 210] There are some problems. On p. 40, Glazebrook writes that "many of the jurors … may have been familiar with the pornē in the brothel and on the streets, [but] the sex laborer who mixed with citizens at elite symposia … was beyond their immediate circle." This sits awkwardly with her statement on p. 70 that "many Athenians would have experienced [symposia] or at the very least would have been familiar with [their] entertainments and the women...

Reviewed by: The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric by Sviatoslav Dmitriev Gunther Martin Sviatoslav Dmitriev, The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021. 354 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-751782-6. The sub-title reveals that this book is not a biography of the orator Demades; it does not describe the work, life, and character of a leading politician in the waning days of Athenian independence. One may instead call it an anti-biography in that it undertakes the deconstruction of nearly all existing evidence about Demades's life and rhetoric. Far from being purely negative, it offers a thorough study of the way in which the rhetorical culture from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Era constructed and moulded its own "Demades," subjecting this phantasmagoria to its own ideas about [End Page 212] the social, moral, and rhetorical qualities of good and bad orators and to its own purposes in propagating these ideas and the concomitant values. Literary sources paint a picture of Demades as a major force in "pro-Macedonian" politics in Athens after the battle of Chaeroneia in 338, i.e., a proponent of a non-confrontational relationship with Philip II and Alexander the Great. The many witticisms ascribed to him show a teller of truth, fearless in the face of monarchs and the democratic mob, making him immensely quotable. While previous biographies of Demades have struggled to distinguish trustworthy information from fanciful anecdotes and to assign the former their historical setting, Dmitriev proposes to cut the Gordian knot by discarding all evidence that is not from Demades's lifetime as fabrication of the later rhetorical educational system, in which progymnasmata and declamations drew on classical (pseudo-)quotes and (often historically impossible) scenarios. His argument is based on an impressive array of material that exposes many of the quotes as stock material ascribed to different characters by different ancient authors, the anecdotes as tropes, for example about corruption, dealing with the masses or flattery. What is left is a small number of references in the Attic orators and epigraphic evidence. One inscription (IG II2 1623, B 166-167), which appears to show Demades's commitment in an operation directed against Macedon in 341/340, is viewed as proof that Demades was by no means a supporter of appeasement or even pro-Macedonian. Dmitriev's scepticism deprives us of many cherished sources, such as Plutarch's Lives of Demades's contemporaries. But if Plutarch was indeed so steeped in the culture of his days that he fell for the inventions of the rhetorical school, so be it: we should be grateful for the purge of misleading material. However, despite the impressive cumulative power of Dmitriev's parallels and his construction of a largely coherent picture of the transformation through rhetorical culture of "Demades," the pendulum swings too far to the side of scepticism (not of the Pyrrhonian kind) when all the later testimonies are discarded as products of a later age. The evidence may be rejected as unreliable, but Dmitriev insists that it is definitely fabrication. Sometimes, however, tropes and clichés may not be pulled out of thin air, and he rarely asks where information may have come from and for which reasons one may have invented biographical snippets (other than the needs of the school room and the self-affirmation of the educated class). Plutarch often drew on contemporary (now lost) sources, not only historians such as Theopompus but also compilations of personal attacks from comedy. The trope of Demades having been a sailor would be in line with Aristophanes's mocking description of Cleon as a tanner. Moreover, in his dismissal of the literary sources, Dmitriev even doubts the authenticity of Hyperides's Against Diondas and both his and Dinarchus's Against Demosthenes. Methodologically problematic is the dismissal of tropes as late because of their "rhetorical tone": that seems to presuppose that the polemicists of the fourth century—i.e., the orators, the "rhetorical" historians, and the comedians—did not adopt a rhetorical tone. (Dmitriev himself, by the way, slams those who accept alleged quotes by Demades on the basis that they sound authentic.) [End Page...

Reviewed by: Los "Principios de Retórica" de Aftonio con anotaciones de Juan de Mal Lara by María Dolores García de Paso Carrasco et al. Raquel Martínez Ballestrín Los "Principios de Retórica" de Aftonio con anotaciones de Juan de Mal Lara. Introducción, edición, traducción y notas, María Dolores García de Paso Carrasco, Trinidad Arcos Pereira, María Elisa Cuyás de Torres, Gregorio Rodríguez Herrera. Madrid, ES: Ediciones Clásicas, 2021. 363 pp. ISBN 978-84-7882-876-0. Los Principios de Retórica de Aftonio constituyen uno de los numerosos manuales en los que quedaron rescatados y expuestos los principios de la retórica clásica para su enseñanza en los ambientes intelectuales y religiosos. En este contexto, la obra de Aftonio fue ampliamente editada, [End Page 202] con constantes traducciones y anotaciones, entre las que destacan las de Lorich, Agrícola y Francisco de Escobar. Se suscribe Juan de Mal Lara a esta tradición, que recoge con especial atención de su maestro Francisco de Escobar, llevando a cabo la edición y anotación de la obra de Aftonio, en la que incluye comentarios a los diferentes ejercicios. Así, en esta obra nos presentan sus editores un cuidado proceso de edición, traducción y estudio de la obra del humanista, con una completa introducción en la que se recoge desde la ubicación biográfica e intelectual del autor hasta la estructuración de los contenidos. En este sentido, es importante referenciar el estudio preliminar que introduce la edición y traducción, en tanto que ofrece al lector un panorama completo de las cuestiones nucleares para la comprensión de la obra: introducen los editores al humanista, presentan su obra, respecto a la que refieren su estructura, objetivos, referencias, desarrollo editorial de las traducciones y comentarios de Aftonio, e, incluso, revisan las máximas educativas sobre las que se asienta el proyecto del intelectual. Este estudio introduce una edición fonética de la obra de Juan de Mal Lara, que los editores toman del ejemplar ubicado en la Biblioteca Nacional de México, aunque lo ofrecen cotejado con los ejemplares encontrados en la Biblioteca Nacional, la Diocesana de Zamora y la de Castilla-La Mancha. Ofrecen en estas páginas la edición de la obra, su traducción y un nutrido corpus de notas en las que se desarrollan tanto explicaciones del contenido como alusiones intertextuales de los diferentes intelectuales que el humanista toma en consideración en la elaboración de sus comentarios. En cuanto a la biografía de Juan de Mal Lara, de esta destaca el contenido autobiográfico que presenta, extraído en su mayor parte de las obras del autor, además de la existencia de biografías elaboradas por coetáneos del humanista. En este sentido, se ofrece en el estudio preliminar una transcripción de la que Pedro Pacheco elabora tan solo veinte años después de su muerte. De este contenido biográfico se destaca su formación intelectual, en la que nombres como el de Francisco de Escobar cuentan con gran presencia e importancia, así como sus producciones, orientadas a las preocupaciones que el autor muestra en torno al estudio de la lengua vernácula y el latín, junto a contenido literario, filosófico y religioso-moral. En el contexto de la producción de Juan de Mal Lara, la elección de la edición de la obra retórica de Aftonio adquiere especial importancia. El Renacimiento constituye un momento de recuperación del pasado grecolatino en el que el estudio de los procesos retóricos para la enseñanza, especialmente vinculada al ámbito escolástico, se revela fundamental. En estos términos, la recuperación de los ejercicios preliminares para el proceso de estudio del discurso pasó por la continua reedición de tratados como los de Aftonio, cuya difusión en el ámbito hispánico estuvo marcada por las ediciones de Agrícola y de Francisco de Escobar. Es en esta tradición, por lo tanto, en la que se enmarca la obra del intelectual...

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland by Brian James Stone Conor O'Brien Brian James Stone, The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, Knowledge Communities. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 275 pp. ISBN 978-94-6298-445-5. This is a volume in the history of rhetoric, rather than the history of Ireland. The author's aim, apparent from the first page, is to introduce the [End Page 214] intellectual riches of early medieval Ireland to fellow scholars of the rhetorical arts and to make the case that Irish writings deserve serious attention from historians of rhetoric interested in the development of the discipline in the post-Roman West. The assumed audience of the book knows little about early medieval Ireland or its intellectual history, and indeed may have been seriously misled by the portrayal of Ireland in previous work on early Irish rhetoric which relied on out-dated ideas of the island as some untouched bastion of Celtic culture, removed from the rest of Latin Europe. Stone is well aware that the past decades have seen these Celtic mists blown away from the study of early Irish intellectual history and he sets out to do the same for early Irish rhetoric in this book. Consequently, the first two chapters of the book essentially summarize much of our existing knowledge about Ireland in its late antique and early medieval context and provide an overview of the evidence for education, learning, and scholarly activity in Ireland between the fifth and the ninth centuries. Little here will be new to historians of the early Middle Ages, but clearly such information is a necessary prelude to Stone's rhetorical analysis of particular primary sources that forms the bulk of the text. Nonetheless, I wonder if the historian of rhetoric, coming to this material for the first time, might not have benefitted from an earlier introduction to the social significance of rhetoric and oral communication in early Ireland. Stone actually provides a very clear and useful discussion of precisely this topic in chapter six: his discussion there of the links between native and ecclesiastical learning, of the social functions of the filid (the poet class which provided Ireland's equivalent to the rhetor), of the real impact of the public performance of praise and satire, all that is both lively and insightful. Providing readers with this discussion earlier in the volume would I think have been useful for putting the enumeration of texts read and written in early medieval Ireland (of which much of chapter two consists) into a richer context. Chapters three through six provide a detailed rhetorical analysis of three primary sources: St Patrick's Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, the Hisperica famina, and the Old Irish "Cauldron of Poetry and Learning." Stone identifies rhetorical tropes utilized, suggests sources or analogues in late antique rhetorical writings, and generally provides detailed case studies of how early medieval Irish authors used language to persuade people or reflected on the nature of a rhetorical education. Stone is less successful in contextualising these texts and explaining what rhetorical analysis can tell us about them as historic works. The problems are most obvious in the section on Patrick, whose Letter receives the most attention despite being the least Irish of the texts surveyed (Patrick was neither born nor educated in Ireland and wrote primarily, if not exclusively, for a non-Irish audience). Stone provides a lot of background discussion drawing on the vast literature on Patrick in a manner which manages to be exhausting, but not exhaustive. We have much summary of mid-twentieth-century debates about Patrick's dating, but nothing on Roy Flechner's recent controversial suggestions for Patrick's purposes in going to Ireland. The analysis of the Letter [End Page 215] itself is overall solid and convincing, but its most original claim (namely that Patrick's rhetoric serves an implicit aim of late Roman "frontier management") remains under-developed. Stone has drawn on some recent important developments in the scholarship of late antique Ireland, especially the work of Elva Johnston, but more time reflecting on the implications of his ideas and explaining...

Reviewed by: La confrontation des points de vue dans la dynamique figurale des discours. Énonciation et interprétation by Alain Rabatel Pierre Chiron Alain Rabatel, La confrontation des points de vue dans la dynamique figurale des discours. Énonciation et interprétation. Limoges, FR: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2021. 655 pp. ISBN 978-2-359-35305-1. Les découpages disciplinaires pèsent sur les objets de la recherche ainsi que sur les méthodes de ladite recherche. Ces découpages sont invétérés par les parcours universitaires et se répercutent sur l'habitus des chercheurs. Dans le cas de l'Antiquité, le problème est d'autant plus gênant que l'existence même d'une discipline suppose un enseignement institutionnalisé et que des champs entiers du savoir comme la sociologie, la linguistique ou la littérature, sont de création récente. L'un des grands apports de l'anthropologie structurale a été de battre en brèche certaines frontières inconsciemment ou consciemment admises et de faire accepter que la philosophie, l'histoire, le droit, la sociologie, ou encore la littérature, etc. pouvaient conjuguer leurs efforts sur les mêmes objets, des textes par exemple, ou des événements ou des traits de civilisation, dans un processus en quelque sorte scialytique. C'est à cette condition que les différences d'approche—le fait par exemple que l'étude de la langue grecque se soit tardivement séparée de sa matrice, la philosophie, et se soit ou bien intégrée à la rhétorique ou bien dissociée en grammaire descriptive et grammaire scolaire—cessent d'être des obstacles et deviennent des richesses. Une fois reliées au projet qui les sous-tend, les notions échappent non seulement au finalisme d'un "progrès" mais aux jugements condescendants coupés de la dynamique propre des doctrines. Parmi ces frontières, celle qui crée un abîme entre la rhétorique et la linguistique est une des plus persistantes. Les fondateurs de l'ISHR en 1977 ont fait deux choix décisifs en la matière : ils ont adopté une démarche historique et privilégié le versant prescriptif et pratique de l'approche du langage—d'où l'emploi du mot rhétorique—sur sa description ou sa théorie. Les cadres théoriques sont volontiers ceux des époques étudiées et l'étude des usages divers de la parole au cours du temps prévaut sur une description fine et scientifiquement actualisée de l'énoncé/texte obtenu. Les historiens ne cherchent pas tant à donner leur nom à une nouvelle théorie qu'à décrire l'attestation de telle ou telle technique oratoire et d'en mesurer l'effet sur tel ou tel public. Les linguistes, de leur côté, ont longtemps travaillé sur des textes inertes ou le système de la langue comme structure abstraite, plus facile à "scientificiser." [End Page 200] L'opposition entre les deux n'est évidemment pas irréductible. Des rapprochements, de part et d'autre, ont été opérés. C'est ainsi que le projet de donner un classement structural aux figures à l'aide des quatre opérations addition-soustraction-mutation-métathèse est commun à la rhétorique tardive (Phoebammon, vie siècle ap. J.-C.) et aux linguistes du Groupe μ de Liège (1970). Les listes de figures illustrant la "rage taxinomique," selon la formule de Roland Barthes, ont été concurrencées à l'époque impériale romaine par des figures conçues non plus comme des énoncés ponctuels remarquables dans l'absolu mais—dans la théorie hermogénienne des ideai—dotées d'une fonction dans la stratégie expressive ou argumentative d'un texte. Réciproquement, la pragmatique puis l'analyse du discours se sont appliquées à élargir l'analyse linguistique aux autres paramètres, voire aux stratégies, de la communication, mais le clivage reste profond. Dans son livre passionnant, AR fait plus que tendre des ponts entre les deux approches. Il fait de l'interprétation, dans sa dynamique, un des moyens du fonctionnement figural, et ses descriptions sont utiles aussi bien au lecteur qu'au producteur d...

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation by Michael Glowasky Rafał Toczko Michael Glowasky, Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation, Supplements to Vigilae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 166. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2021. 195 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-44668-7. Augustine's rhetoric is experiencing a new wave of scholarly interest. Michael Glowasky's PhD monographic thesis is among the growing number of explorations of Augustine's rhetorical practice, unique in focusing solely on Augustine the preacher. The introduction (1-29) first presents the reasons for selecting this subject and reflects on the problems of studying Augustine's sermons as a coherent corpus. Next, he proposes classifying them into three categories based on the audience's "stages of spiritual maturation" (15): catechumens, neophytes and the faithful. This is novel, as scholars usually discern between catechumens and others, because the rules of participation in liturgy differed between them. Glowasky corroborates his decision with passages from two sermons (353 and 392) in which Augustine makes a parallel between the age of innocence of the newly baptised and infants. Glowasky's division of audiences into three categories is crucial for the whole study, constituting the basis for the selection of material and the method of communicating findings. The grouping is simple and elegant. Closing the introduction, Glowasky outlines his method for approaching Augustine's use of rhetoric and scripture in these three groups. First, he redefines the classical concept of narratio, to apply it more broadly as a way of communication that may replace logical argument to "communicate deeper meaning with more persuasive and emotive force" (23). Glowasky assumes that Augustine drew here on a long Latin rhetorical tradition and made use of narratio in two senses. Firstly, narratio is the story God tells the faithful through creation, history and Scripture. Secondly, the Scripture was understood as the narratio of the sermons. Furthermore, he assumes Augustine used a different type of narratio addressing different groups, applying a forensic narratio addressing neophytes, a deliberative type addressing catechumens, and, preaching to the faithful, "draws out more fully the dialectical quality of narratio." Chapter 2 (30-56) explores the notion of narratio more deeply, building on John O'Banion's controversial claim that, for Quintilian, narratio was [End Page 207] "the orator's fundamental art" (341) and was understood as a thought process and way of communicating rather than a part of speech.1 Glowasky believes that Augustine shared this tradition and hence saw narratio as "a ready-made tool to be used to refer to the strategic ordering of temporal events in order to convey an author's particular meaning" (36). Narratio could substitute logical argument and be more persuasive if ordered properly. Glowasky again turns to O'Banion and Kenneth Burke to explain that Augustine treated "narratio primarily as a tool for interpreting Scripture" (41) but, contrary to these two scholars, links this thinking with the prior rhetorical tradition. This tradition seemingly emphasised that narratio proved to be the best tool for conveying meaning. Augustine presented Scripture as a coherent and reliable narratio in De doctrina Christiana and employed it as the narratio of his sermons. Glowasky bases his thesis on O'Banion article on Quintilian. However, Quintilian says various things about narratio throughout his vast work—some contradictory. But the main difficulty is that nothing suggests that Augustine knew the Institutiones well. They were not used as manuals of rhetoric at that time, when teaching was dominated by De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium and many books drawing on them, authored by Marius Victorinus, Grillius and other rhetores latini minores. Chapter 3 (57-88) is dedicated to proving the thesis that Augustine's sermons for catechumens seek to persuade them to enter the Catholic Church as the only place where salvation is attainable (57). Glowasky observes how Augustine's technical advice concerning preaching to the catechumens from De catechizandis rudibus shares much with Cicero's view of narratio in judicial oratory. Augustine's two sample speeches from the same book focus on describing the character of the Church through narratio...

Wilfredo Alvarez's (2022) Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor premises its thesis around "the vital relationship among work, social and cultural integration, and language acquisition" (p. 3) for many multiply marginalized immigrants in the United States, particularly Latin Americans. In his case study of Latin American immigrants who served as janitors at a predominantly white public institute---Rocky Mountain University (RMU)---and their interactional, intercultural, and organizational communications with their patrons (e.g., university faculty, students, or staff), Alvarez theorizes how facets of social identities, communications, languages, and workplace settings are intimately intertwined to generate and reinforce public imaginaries and readings of marginalized immigrant individuals and communities.

Yvonne Cleary's The Profession and Practice of Technical Communication (2022) offers a narrative survey on communication design/technical communication as an academic field of study but also builds bridges between academic work (both pedagogical and research-oriented) to work environments and practitioners in the professional realm. Because of the book's organizational structure and approachable text, Cleary is highly successful both in her research and the presentation of it, creating a valuable resource for students and providing insight for field practitioners.

Preview this article: Review: The Hidden Inequities in Labor-BasedContract Grading, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/50/3/teachingenglishinthetwoyearcollege32515-1.gif

Preview this article: Review Essay: On Embodiment, Recognition, and Writing Centers: A Review, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/4/collegeenglish32460-1.gif

Preview this article: Review Essay: Abject, Afuerx, and Anxious in Young Adult Literature, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/4/collegeenglish32459-1.gif

In 1966, more than 50 scholars from the UK, US, and Canada convened at Dartmouth College to discuss the state of the profession of English teaching, ultimately proposing a “growth” model of language learning which contrasted with the skills-based models of curriculum sequencing prevalent at the time. While debates about the impact of the 1966 Dartmouth conference on the teaching of English continue to ebb and flow, from contrasting early accounts by seminar participants (Muller, 1967; Dixon, 1969) to more modern work which situates the conference as a harbinger of the process movement (Trimbur, 2008) or Writing Across the Curriculum (Palmquist et al., 2020), its continued provocation of scholarly discussion has become a legacy in its own right. Even if the Dartmouth Seminar didn't change anything happening in the classrooms of its era and thereafter, which is unlikely (Harris, 1991), it would remain a rare moment of international, professional collaboration and consideration virtually unparalleled in our field's history.

Greig Henderson, University of Toronto Robert V. Wess, Philosophical Turns: Epistemological, Linguistic, and Metaphysical . Parlor Press, 2023. 288 pages. 978-1-64317-370-2 (paperback, $34.99) 978-1-64317-371-9 (hardcover $69.99) 978-1-64317-372-6 (PDF $29.99) 978-1-64317-373-3 (EPUB $29.99) The new wave of contemporary criticism rejects both the depth model and the hermeneutics of suspicion that goes with it. Critique gives way to postcritique, and styles of disenchantment such as symptomatic reading, ideological demystification, and new historicism are seen to be passé. Reparative styles of criticism supplant paranoid styles, and critics like Rita Felski and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick have proposed that literature should be equipment for living rather than equipment for debunking and politicizing. “We know only too well,” Felski writes, “the well-oiled machine of ideology critique, the x-ray gaze of symptomatic reading, the smoothly rehearsed moves that add up to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Ideas that seemed revelatory thirty years ago—the decentered subject! the social construction of reality!—have dwindled into shopworn slogans; defamiliarizing has lapsed into dogma.” In a similar vein, Sedgewick maintains that the hermeneutics of suspicion is a “quintessentially paranoid style of critical engagement; it calls for constant vigilance, reading against the grain, assuming the worst-case scenario, and then rediscovering its own gloomy prognosis in every text.” This postcritical turn is connected with surface or distant reading, a way of reading that supposedly supplants deep and close reading. As Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski point out in their introduction to Critique and Postcritique , this way of reading works “against the assumption that the essential meaning of a text resides in a repressed or unconscious content that requires excavation by the critic. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus urge greater attention to what lies on the surface—the open to view, the…

Review of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, New York: NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. 484 pages. $30.00 hardcover, $20.00 trade paperback, $14.99 e-book.

Review of Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty. By Christa Teston. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 256 pages. $35.00 paper.

Reviewed by: Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self by Adam Ellwanger Ryan McDermott (bio) Adam Ellwanger, Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2020. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08593-7. This book moves metanoia and related concepts of transformation and conversion to the center of our theoretical understanding of ethos. Whereas for Aristotle ethos had depended on the audience—did they consider the speaker trustworthy?—now the speaking subject determines how ethos ought to be recognized, and the audience must defer to the subject's self-understanding. As a rhetorical device, Ellwanger shows, metanoia is one of the most important means by which subjects can establish ethos in either of these models. This book's consistent concern is to analyze how, precisely, metanoia is employed in the service of ethos in various contexts and rhetorical and ethical models. At its best, Ellwanger's study adopts a comparative method—what he calls "paratactical rhetorical analysis"—that allows different understandings of metanoia to clarify each other by contrast. Ellwanger also approaches his topic diachronically, telling a story of development or transformation in the practices of metanoia. This narrative gives the book its structure, moving from classical and ancient Jewish sources to early Christianity, then the Protestant Reformation, post-Enlightenment modernity, and what Ellwanger characterizes as the postmodernity of today. Each chapter's narrative section culminates with a theoretical elaboration, which is then worked out in a section of comparative examples. This reviewer found the heuristic, second section of each chapter the more effective. For example, Chapter One compares five different Christian conversion stories (all post-1850), including the Sioux Indian Ohiyesa's memoirs of his transition From the Deep Woods to Civilization, two accounts of conversions in China, and two testimonies from members of the rock band Korn. Ellwanger is able to compare these diverse experiences with impressive conceptual clarity. The major conceptual contrast that runs throughout the book is that between metanoia and epistrophe. When speaking of the contrast, Ellwanger characterizes epistrophe as a 360-degree conversion, a return home. He reserves metanoia for 180-degree conversions, which renounce the past self and result in a rebirth, a replacement of the original subject by a "completely" new subject. In Ellwanger's account, all Christian metanoia "is a substitutive transplanting of identity," and it "locates the substitution at the core of one's being" (95). Modern, secular conversions can also involve renunciation of a previous self, but they lean more heavily on epistrophic unveiling of and return to the original, authentic self. Epistrophic conversion never renounces the real self, but rather the former illusion of self. Theoretically, this contrast harbors considerable explanatory power. It helps make sense of why ethos can reside alternately in audience or speaker. When a speaker seeks to establish ethos by claiming that her previous self is dead and she is now a new (and better) self, she might appeal to the audience to authenticate whether she is indeed new and better. But when a speaker [End Page 93] claims to have discovered and returned to her original, authentic self, she expects the audience to acknowledge her authority to authenticate herself. The contrast between ethoi established by metanoic or epistrophic conversion narratives plays out in fascinating ways in the contrast between Bruce Jenner's coming out as gender-transitioned Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezol's racial transition from identifying as a White woman to identifying as a Black woman. In public responses to each narrative (which unfolded roughly contemporaneously), Ellwanger identifies both metanoic and epistrophic discourses. Each kind was employed by both critics and defenders of the respective claims to identity. The conflict between metanoic and epistrophic understandings of identity transition help account for the intense scrutiny and controversy each story attracted. The weakest part of the book is its narrative of secularization, which frames Christian and modern models of conversion as mutually exclusive. Ellwanger asserts that "in Judeo-Christian thinking metanoia and epistrophe were two fundamentally opposed models of conversion" (100). By contrast, "the definitive feature of modern transformation is a reconciliation of" the two models (p. 143). Likewise, "Christianity is especially...

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Mario Telò (bio) Brooke Rollins, The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 230 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1424-4. There aren't many bold books on ancient Greek rhetoric. When I say "rhetoric," I mean specifically the corpus of speeches of the orators of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and by "bold" I mean scholarship that does not treat these texts simply as historical documents or stylistic paradigms but as complex literary constructions that invite theoretically engaged approaches. I can think, for example, of Victoria Wohl's Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which focuses on how the very idea of the law—conceptualized as a self-styled notion of authority—affects the arguments of judicial oratory. We should be grateful to Brooke Rollins for having produced another big, bold book on a body of work that most often receives the empiricist and historicist treatment prevalent in the field of classical studies. This book has left me with the uplifting impression that, inspired by Rollins, more work in a similar vein will soon follow and that the world of fourth-century bce orators can finally gain the attention of those outside of classics. Rollins stages a compelling encounter between Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, on the one hand, and Derrida on the other, engaging with the philosopher's late period, in the 1990s, when he produced a rich set of ethically and politically oriented writings. This orientation has always been central to the project of deconstruction. Rollins relays Derrida's formulation: "the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political" (9). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Derrida we see here is more Levinasian than Heideggerian; it is a Derrida deeply attentive to the implications of alterity for hospitality, friendship, and democracy. [End Page 95] Rollins is interested precisely in how the interruptive force of alterity is thematized by oratory's constitutive reliance on the address—to judges in a courtroom, to an assembly, and to listeners gathered for a specific occasion or implied, abstract, "ghostly" readers. Her main goal is to show that "when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes" (5). This implosion is not simply the failure of the speech's argumentation, its surrender to the inevitable powers of indeterminacy. The emphasis is, rather, on the ethical affirmation that derives from the unsettling of identity brought about by the projection toward an other that is the address. As Rollins put it, "We encounter no controlling, autonomous speaking subjects here, but beings constituted (and so interrupted) in an encounter with difference" (6). The claim to authority, to a kind of indivisible, closed-off truth, is contradicted by the very opening to the outside (the speaking to) that is intrinsic to the conception of a speech. In this perspective, the speech becomes "a nontotalizable encounter, in which responsibility, negotiation and decision are owed to the other" (6). Persuasion, the alleged primary function of speech-writing, is thus complicated by an ex-cess, an ethical responsibility, emerging from "the unsettling moment of rapprochement with the unassimilable other" (37). In this way, persuasion can be regarded "not as a traditional communicative transaction, but as a possibility given only by way of our ongoing responsibility to and for the nonpresent other" (41). It becomes the staging of an aporetic moment, the opportunity for "a response in which both self and other are transformed" (45). In the chapter on Gorgias, Rollins focuses on the much-discussed Encomium of Helen, pushing against the apparent takeaway of the speech, an affirmation of logocentrism, of the affective power of logos. As Rollins observes, "Helen is marked, engraved, written by what is radically other to her" (61). The upshot is that "the subject is nothing but the effect of affirming the other's unwilled address" (63) and so is the all-encompassing, fetishized logos, another, albeit depersonalized, Über-subject, at...

Reviewed by: Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius Fabrizio Petorella (bio) Libanios, Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI, texte établi et traduit par Catherine Bry, Collection des universités de France Série grecque—Collection Budé 550. Paris, FR: Les Belles Lettres, 2020. 278 pp. EAN: 978-2-251-00637-6. Libanius, Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations, ed., intro., trans. and notes, Robert J. Penella. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 420 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-48137-3. Our knowledge of Late Antique rhetorical school practice has been recently enriched by several studies focused on Libanius' works: in the last decades, the Antiochean rhetor has been the subject of key monographs and academic articles on upper-class education in the Later Empire and [End Page 104] many of his writings have been edited and translated into modern languages.1 The two volumes discussed here are part of this upsurge of interest in Libanius's teaching activity. Furthermore, they are meant to lay the foundations for future studies aimed at contributing to the debate on Late Antique paideia. Antiochean school life is at the core of the orations edited and translated by Catherine Bry. Her volume, which is the result of her doctoral research at the École Pratique des Hautes Études of Paris, opens with a brief introduction clarifying why the three Libanian speeches she takes up deserve to be analyzed together: composed in the second half of the 380s, they all stem from problems related to Libanius's role as a teacher. Thus, Orations 34, 35, and 36 provide a vivid testimony about the teaching of Greek rhetoric in the Eastern Empire and the issues that even a renowned sophist might face. These initial remarks are followed by an extremely accurate section devoted to philological aspects. Even though Bry acknowledges the importance of the last edition of the three speeches (published by Richard Foerster in 1906), she considers that work too distant from modern philological conventions.2 As a result of a rigorous re-examination of the whole manuscript tradition, she integrates the descriptions of the sources given by Foerster, Jean Martin, and Pierre-Louis Malosse with her personal observations, thus offering a detailed presentation of all witnesses and a stemma codicum for each of the three orations.3 In this well-ordered preliminary phase, Bry demonstrates a scrupulously honest approach, enabling the reader to access and—if (s)he wishes—to question her philological work. After a list of abbreviations and a bibliography (significantly divided into a section specifically devoted to the edition of the three speeches and a general bibliography), comes the core of the volume. Every oration is preceded by a brief and clear introduction, where the reader finds information on the date and circumstances in which Libanius originally delivered his speech and on the audience he intended to address, as well as a rhetorical analysis of the following text and a list of its previous editions and translations. [End Page 105] In contrast to Foerster, Bry opts for positive apparatuses and avoids mentioning orthographical variants, unless they have some morphological (and, consequently, semantic) value. This approach (which does not prevent her from quoting the conjectures of previous editors when necessary) has the merit of making her edition a very practical tool for the study of the three orations and their textual history. The translation heads in the same direction. It is clear and original and allows the reader to easily grasp the main aspects of Libanius' oratorical performances, accurately transposed into a modern language. In these respects, the volume shows clearly how scholarly accuracy and readability can be combined, thus producing an edition that can be appreciated on several levels. To complete this picture, Bry's commentary is agile, but exhaustive. Her explanatory notes reveal once more a strong interest in the context in which the orations were originally performed and in their rhetorical features. Libanius' words are analyzed in relation to Late Antique rhetorical theories and to their application at school (see, for example, the entry concerning the role of memorization in the learning process at pp. 43–44, n. 55). Particular attention is...

Reviewed by: The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past by Matteo Barbato Christine Plastow (bio) Matteo Barbato, The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-6642-4. Barbato's book offers a new analysis of Athenian ideology through the application of a New Institutionalist approach to the city's democratic institutions as demonstrated by their use of stories from the mythical past. He argues for a middle ground between Marxist and culturalist understandings, characterising Athenian ideology as value-neutral, flexible, normative, constructive, and bidirectional. This is illustrated through an analysis of the varied presentations of four myths across several institutional contexts: particularly the epitaphioi logoi, but also tragedy, Assembly and forensic speeches, and private genres. An introduction lays out the structure of the book and summarises previous approaches to Athenian ideology; there is a particular focus on the Marxist approach of Nicole Loraux and others, and the culturalist approach illustrated by the work of Josiah Ober. The second chapter explores Athenian knowledge of mythology, identifying the theatre as its main source but also noting the importance of religious festivals such as the Panathenaia, public institutional contexts, and private learning. The third chapter establishes Barbato's theoretical approach, drawing on New Institutionalism to argue that the different democratic institutions of Athens had their own discursive frameworks and that discourse within them was necessarily structured by these: the need to create an imagined community in the funeral speeches; the requirement to argue in favour of justice in the law courts; the principle of advantage for the Athenians in the Assembly, and both justice and advantage in the Council; and the ability to play with the ideological frameworks of other institutions and the need to appeal to a diverse audience at the dramatic festivals. The subsequent four chapters examine the use of four stories from the Athenian mythic past in these institutional contexts and in private genres: the concept of Athenian autochthony, the sheltering of the Heraclidae, the Amazonomachy, and the assistance provided to Adrastus against Thebes. A short conclusion summarises the book's arguments and contextualises its contributions to the study of Athenian ideology, democracy more broadly, and interactions between Classics and political science. [End Page 88] There is much to commend Barbato's book. His analysis of Athenian ideology highlights two important points that are not prominent in the work on the subject to date. First, he emphasises that Athenian ideology was not fixed but fluid and dynamic, and that the presentation of ideological material necessarily differed based on the context in which it was delivered. This is an important point to grasp to understand the Athenians' apparent tendency to contradict themselves from source to source. Barbato successfully illustrates the appropriateness of different perspectives in different institutional contexts. For example, his nuanced analysis of the various versions of the myth of Adrastus presented in Lysias' funeral oration, Euripides' Suppliant Women, and Assembly speeches convincingly shows how the emphasis on or exclusion of certain narrative features—such as the hybris of the Thebans—can be manipulated to evoke aspects of the democratic ideology suitable to the setting. Second, he is right to draw attention to the fact that ideological material not only describes the audience's viewpoint but also moulds it by demonstrating a norm to which they are expected to conform, touching implicitly on an important point regarding the cognitive effects of rhetoric. Indeed, this methodology in combination with a cognitive approach could produce a particularly strong reading: for instance, how was the ideological result affected by the movement of audience members between the institutions and their memory of the different versions they had heard in other arenas? Barbato is working within a particular school of thought in the study of Athenian oratory that proposes that strict expectations of acceptability were in place in the various contexts of public speaking. Indeed, in his conclusion he summarises that the institutionalist reading of fixed discursive parameters in the institutions "corroborates the view that Aristotle's subdivision of the discipline into three genres was based on the observation of actual oratorical practice" (219). While the...

Reviewed by: Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World by Stuart M. McManus Don Paul Abbott (bio) Stuart M. McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-83016-4. The title of Stuart McManus's book might lead readers to expect a history of rhetoric in the Americas. That expectation would be perhaps misleading, for the "empire of eloquence" extends far beyond the New World and encompasses all the territories that were under the direct control or indirect influence of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. It was a realm that included portions of Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. It was, like a later empire, a vast domain upon which the sun never set. It was also a polity of remarkable duration, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing well into the nineteenth. Most importantly for readers of Rhetorica this empire was also a place where "neo-Roman public speaking was the archetypal ordering mode in Iberian urban settings, and a powerful tool for spreading ideas, building political consensus, bolstering religion and articulating standards of public behavior that could take place in Latin, European vernaculars and indigenous languages" (5). [End Page 97] The immense geographical and chronological scope this empire requires a correspondingly comprehensive research endeavor. And so, the author helpfully includes a map of some of his extensive research travels. The inclusion of this map leads to the inevitable question: where in the world is Stuart McManus? The answer, it seems, is that while preparing this book he might have been found in any number of far-flung archives and libraries. The result of McManus' scholarly travels is a study that is, in his words, both "meta-geographical" and "polycentic." He contends that "the early modern Hispanic monarchy, and arguably the Iberian world as a whole, cannot usefully described only in terms of a series of bilateral relationships between the crown and subject territories" (197). Accordingly, McManus traces the interconnections between the practice of rhetoric in the various colonies, enclaves, dependencies, allies, and outposts that made up the Iberian world. And despite the great diversity of that world, its rhetorical culture exhibited remarkable consistency and continuity. Most notably, "the early modern Iberian world saw an unprecedented flowering of epideictic oratory" (40). The Empire of Eloquence is, therefore, a cultural and intellectual history constructed around the oration and, in particular, the epideictic oration—sermons, academic discourses, civic celebrations, and funeral orations. This work is, therefore, a history of oratory rather than a history of rhetoric (in the sense of the rhetorical theory and precepts found in the handbooks and treatises of the early modern period). This is not to say these handbooks and treatises are neglected—they are not—but simply that they are ancillary to the story of the oration. Indeed, one of the strengths of McManus' book is that it analyses an impressive variety of neglected, and mostly unpublished, speeches. These are important artifacts that have been often overlooked by scholars in favor published, and thus more accessible, rhetorical treatises and textbooks. This intellectual history is comprised of a series of case studies which typically examine either individual orators or a particular variety of epideictic oratory. An example of the latter is the study of the epideictic oratory following the death of Philip IV in 1665. The Spanish King's death prompted commemorations (exequias) which included funeral oratory as well as poetry, ephemeral architecture, and other memorial forms. McManus studies 42 exequias between 1665 and 1667 which were celebrated from "the Philippines to Flanders and from Mexico to Milan" (51). The content of funeral orations reveals a remarkable similarity despite their wide geographical distribution. These encomia were, of course, speeches praising Philip's virtues, most notably justice and religious devotion. But they also emphasize that Philip's virtues should be embraced and emulated by the citizens and authorities who inhabited the empire, thereby strengthening its political and social structures. Thus, these funeral orations were, according to McManus, a form of "virtue politics" that served both to honor the...

Reviewed by: Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age by Nathan R. Johnson, and: Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer by Seth Long David Marshall (bio) Nathan R. Johnson, Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2020. 205 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2060-7. Seth Long, Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 243 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-69514-3. Is memory the sleeping giant of the five parts of classical rhetoric? Some rhetoricians have been skeptical of the entire art of memory enterprise, denying essentially that there are any artificial means of training natural capacities for memory. But many have been believers, and there are vivid arguments asserting how memory as the fourth of those classical parts underwrites and illuminates each of the others. Memory is invention by another name, because the treasure house of previous performances is also a store of potential recombinations. In the most famous of the ancient mnemonic exercises, practitioners were asked to use a familiar architectural form—a sequence of rooms in a home they knew well, for instance—as a background and storage facility for items they wished to remember, and in the emphasis on sequencing there is a logic and practice of arrangement. (Cicero relayed an origin story for this topos about the Greek poet Simonides: during a performance at a dinner, he was called away; while he was away, the roof collapsed killing those within, mangling their bodies beyond recognition; but Simonides was able to identify the dead because he recalled where each guest had been sitting—and the inference was that visualizing figures against a ground is the secret of memorization.) When it comes to the work of symbolizing items to be set against this imagined background, moreover, we are certainly in the domain of style and trope. In the example that Pseudo-Cicero made famous (Rhet. Her., 3.20.33–34), we are asked to picture a scene in which a ram's testicles hang from the fourth finger of a man's hand. The goal of such imagining is to more securely recall facts that are relevant to a legal case we are memorizing—namely, the facts of an inheritance (Romans made purses from scrotums) and the availability of witnesses (testicle and testimony share an etymology). And, as for delivery, the deep paradox of memory is that organizing and practicing the passage of things from the present into the past is in fact one of the keys to performing in the moment: it is as if the artisan of a well-constructed and vividly-appointed memory palace is like an acrobat with every potential move memorized and at-hand equidistant as it were from the here and now of performance. There is thus a lot to say about the rhetorical dimensions of memory, and taken together the two books reviewed here, Nathan Johnson's Architects of Memory and Seth Long's Excavating the Memory Palace, make wide-ranging use of memory's rhetorical histories to make claims about contemporary mnemonic practices and possibilities. Nathan Johnson makes a pitch for the significance of the material infrastructures of memory work, and he anchors this pitch in histories of [End Page 100] the different cultures of Library Science and Information Studies after World War II in the United States. Johnson organizes his attention around two significant figures and their respective institutional contexts: Dorothy Crosland, a librarian at Georgia Tech from 1925 (and head librarian from 1953–1971), and Robert S. Taylor, who wrote the influential work The Making of a Library (1970) and who, within a year of his appointment as Dean in 1973, changed the name of the School of Library Science at Syracuse University to the School of Information Studies. Johnson does note the different trajectories that each of these individuals represents. In his narrative, Crosland represents a library sciences profession that women dominated and that was often coded as a "feminine" form of labor, and Taylor represents the rise of...