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May 2018

  1. Remonstrative Agitation as Feminist Counterpublic Rhetoric

April 2018

  1. “[M]ost plain, rational, and easie”: Rhetorical Disavowal in Early Eighteenth-Century Inoculation Pamphlets
    Abstract

    In the second decade of the eighteenth century, English physicians mobilized a rapidly expanding print culture to launch themselves into the thick of public debate with sharply worded pamphlets defending and denouncing the newly introduced practice of inoculation (the less effective forerunner of vaccination). This paper explores the new kind of medical rhetoric that flourished in the midst of this controversy, one that downplays medical authority and even disavows its own rhetorical character, much like the vaccination debates of today.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2018.1424476
  2. Horace’sOdesas the “Hidden Rhetoric” of the Principate, 27 BCE to 14 CE
    Abstract

    The principate of Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE) has been portrayed as a period of rhetorical decline, given the suppression of late-Republic fiery, Ciceronian oratory. Building from recent scholarship that complicates this narrative, this article considers public poetry as a site of rhetorical practice, enriching understandings of rhetoric’s metamorphosis during the principate. In particular, the Odes of Horace—public poetry with persuasive designs achieved through enthymematic argument—are one example of how poetry served as a form of “hidden” epideictic rhetoric during the reign of Augustus when traditional forms of oratory were suppressed.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2018.1424471
  3. Plato, Mary Baker Eddy, and Kenneth Burke:Can We Talk About Substance?
    Abstract

    Kenneth Burke confessed that Permanence and Change was a secularization of the writing of Mary Baker Eddy that he learned in his Christian Science childhood. Eddy’s Platonic treatment of substance as “truth” engages with the tension between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, foreshadowing Burke’s treatment of substance in relation to symbol, nonsymbol, and identification. The ways in which substance and identification interact in the works of Plato, Eddy, and Burke follow a line of discursive development that can illuminate critical review of how different forms of public discourse argue for “truth.”

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2018.1424479
  4. The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus’ Histories with Special Attention to Books 5–9 by Vasiliki Zali
    Abstract

    432 RHETORIC A The final topic, that of chapter eight, is lexis, "style." Enos says very lit­ tle about traditional features of style (e.g., pleonasm, prose rhythm), but dis­ cusses instead Demosthenes's "stylistic strategy," which consists primarily of what he calls "chiastic contrasting" (191). More than to chiasmus, this seems connected to antithesis, that is, the "polar" or "diametrical" opposi­ tion between Aeschines and himself. Enos concludes that like Lincoln, Churchill, and King, Demosthenes raised political oratory to a literary art and created a speech perfectly fitted for the political and rhetorical moment. The book could have used some good copy-editing and proof-reading; in particular, the bibliography is not easy to use. It consists of four sections; texts and translation of Demosthenes, translations and studies of Aeschines, studies of Demosthenes, and general studies. The first section is especially difficult: almost all works are under Demosthenes as author, followed by the title, so that if one is looking for X's translation, one needs to remember its exact title (some of the Texas series have the title Demosthe­ nes: Speeches . . ., whereas others are just Speeches . . .). Dilts's OCT is listed as a translation, as are several commentaries (e.g., Wankel's). One author is "Harris Edward Monroe." Etc. In sum, this book has much of value, especially Walker's chapter. But starting from scratch rather than revising a fifty year old publication might have improved its value. Michael Gagarin The University of Texas Vasiliki Zali. The Shape ofHerodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus' Histories with Special Attention to Books 5-9. Interna­ tional Studies in the History of Rhetoric 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. VIII + 383 pp. ISBN: 9789004278967 This is a well-researched, detailed, and well-presented literary analy­ sis of the Histories of Herodotus that substantiates the author's claim that the Histories is an under-appreciated contributor to the development of rhetoric in the 5th century. As Zali explains, the intent of the work is "to show that in the Histories there is great interest in the rhetorical situation per se; that speakers are very well aware of the process of manipulating and adapting their arguments to suit the particular audience, and they do so systematically" (3). In this way, Herodotus can be understood as anticipat­ ing the rhetorical developments of Thucydides and the more theoretically oriented works of both Aristotle and the author of the Rhetoric to Alexan­ der. The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric is characterized by the use of specific textual examples to illustrate claims about how the text operates. It also provides an impressive mixture of contextual information that is historical, political, and cultural in scope. These elements are trained on the larger Reviews 433 purpose of "a comprehensive study of particular modes, kinds and effects of speech, exemplified through in-depth discussions of case studies and of the ways these related to two overarching narrative themes: the GrecoPersian polarity and the problem of Greek unity" (31). The focus on these two themes, through the analysis of Herodotus' rhetorical choices, is divided into three sections. In the first section, "Allo­ cation of Speech," the analysis extends to the impact of the speeches both included and excluded as well as the selective use of both direct and indi­ rect speech. Zali takes these selections and choices by Herodotus to be rhe­ torical, choices that are made in order to advance his interpretive and persuasive goals. They are also shown to be empowering for the Greeks as presented in the text and disempowering for the Persians. Zali thus makes a strong case that these choices by Herodotus were not random. As a result, while Cicero and many others have viewed him as the father of history, Herodotus should also be viewed as a significant figure in the development of rhetoric. The text includes an appendix that categorizes all of the debates and conversations in books 5-9 by speaker, addressee and mode of speech (i.e., direct, indirect, and record of a speech act). In the second section of the book, Zali shows that a narrow definition of debate, as consisting only of instances reported as direct speech, yields...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2018.0005
  5. Demosthenes’ On the Crown: Rhetorical Perspectives ed. by James J. Murphy
    Abstract

    Reviews James J. Murphy, ed., Demosthenes' On the Crown: Rhetorical Perspec­ tives, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 232 pp. ISBN: 9780809335107 This book has a curious history. First published in 1967 by Random House under the title, Demosthenes' On the Crown: A Critical Case Study of a Masterpiece of Ancient Oratory, the exact same work was then republished in 1983 under the same name by Hermagoras Press. The current volume is a "revised version" of the 1983 publication; the 1967 publication is not acknowledged but is mentioned by one author (201, n. 30). The revision consists of a new Introduction by Murphy, five new chap­ ters (out of eight), and a new half-page epilogue by Murphy. The three retained chapters (from the 1967 publication) are chapter two, a brief sum­ mary of Aeschines' career followed by a summary of his speech Against Ctesiphon by Donovan Ochs; chapter three, a translation of On the Crown (OTC) by John J. Keaney; and chapter four, a brief structural abstract of OTC by Francis Donnelly, first published in 1941. The five new chapters are chapter one, a background chapter on Demosthenes and his times by Lois Agnew, chapters on Aristotle's three main rhetorical divisions - includ­ ing chapter five on ethos by David Mirhady, chapter six on pathos by Richard Katula, and chapter seven on logos by Jeffrey Walker - and an eighth chapter on lexis by Richard Enos. The goal of the volume, according to the introduction is to make OTC "come alive"; in more modest terms, the book seems to be aiming to pro­ vide everything a student unacquainted with the speech might need to appreciate Demosthenes's rhetorical ability and, for more advanced stu­ dents and scholars, to demonstrate how the principles of Aristotle's Rheto­ ric can help appreciate the greatness of OTC. In my view, several chapters succeed quite well in accomplishing this latter goal, while several are less successful. In chapter one, "Demosthenes and his Times," Agnew gives a thor­ ough account of Demosthenes's life and career; she is particularly good at sorting out facts from legends, and she produces a more balanced assess­ ment than the many pro-Demosthenes accounts. I note only two minor mis­ takes. On page 25, the three charges Aeschines brought against Ctesiphon's decree are misstated; the first (not having completed his term in office) is Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 4, pp. 430-439. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.4.430. Reviews 431 stated twice (in slightly different forms) and the second (presenting the crown in the theater) is omitted (the correct charges are on 38, 153). And in the Harpalus affair Demosthenes was not tried in the Areopagus but by a popular jury (see 29). Chapters two and three are adequate, though barely so. Ochs's account of Aeschines's career is highly oversimplified, especially after Agnew's more complex treatment, and his summary of the speech is based on the 1928 Bude edition; a few more recent studies could have been noted (espe­ cially Harris), which are in fact in the bibliography. I cannot see any use for Donnelley's structural abstract, chapter four, which I just find confusing. In chapter five, Mirhady uses Aristotle's view of ethos to understand Demosthenes's sustained and generally successful attempt to portray him­ self as a good democratic citizen, better than his rival Aeschines. Mirhady is a bit dismayed, however, by the (also successful) use of vitriolic rhetoric to portray Aeschines as a piece of scum. In his final thought, Mirhady cau­ tions that this "sustained invective should give readers today some uneasi­ ness about the tendency of democracies to fall under the sway of negative discourse" (126). Mirhadv's concern must be even greater now than it was when his chapter was written. Katula's assignment, chapter six, is pathos. Using Aristotle's theory...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2018.0004

March 2018

  1. On Political Perversion
    Abstract

    Recent attempts to brand US President Donald J. Trump as a psychotic or fascist have failed because such labels do not capture the double character of his appeal. In this essay, I argue Jacques Lacan’s understanding of perversion better captures Trump’s peculiar brand of political rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2018.1428766
  2. “Caliphate” against the Crown: Martyrdom, Heresy, and the Rhetoric of Enemyship in the Kingdom of Jordan
    Abstract

    Abstract The execution of captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in February 2015 by Daesh (or ISIS) forces generated large public outcry in Jordan and thereby presented the regime of King Abdullah II with a moment of danger. In response to this rhetorical situation, the Abdullah regime engaged in rhetorics of enemyship based on appeals to religious orthodoxy, authoritarian ideology, and apocalyptic language. By examining these texts, this essay seeks to draw from contemporary rhetorical scholarship on terrorism, enemyship, and mass violence to expand the heuristic scope of the rhetoric of enemyship to include political rhetoric situated outside democratic contexts.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0117

February 2018

  1. Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication
    Abstract

    As we so often trip about and lose our breath over speaking precisely to “what is rhetoric(al)?,” it should come to no surprise that being asked what we want of rhetoric, of language, of an other (in language) moves us to fidget, even brings us to blush. But if we pause with these questions, lips parted without yet the words to answer, we may notice a peculiar craving that churns before the naming. We want of rhetoric—but what? We are compelled toward rhetoric—whereto? We seek in rhetoric—for? If this desire, what Hannah Arendt calls an appetite for love for its own sake, refers to the will to “have and to hold,” our love in/for/through rhetoric always seems to slip from capture. So much so that after a whirl of scholarship that attempts to wed or to divorce rhetoric from a definitive purpose, from its technē, we must now let the lids of our eyes fold into a softer gaze. What do we want of rhetoric? At last, it spills over: “I want you to be.”1We are invited into this vulnerability, to voice such a confession, in Mari Lee Mifsud's Rhetoric of the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication. This book—itself a living form of rhetorical gift/giving—in some way revisits very traditional themes of the ethics and sociality of communication and does so within the canonically sanctioned context of classical antiquity. That said, it possesses a far more adventurous spirit than do missionary readings of Aristotle's Rhetoric. For Mifsud, the possibilities of gift/giving in communication spread beyond exchange and art; she explores rhetoric's gift/giving as “prior to and in excess of art, not as some rudimentary system of relating that awaits systematic and philosophical development, but as some thing, some event, some movement, other than art, other than technē, incommensurable even, meaning outside the system of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures, meaning other than signification, other than symbols, yet always already within and functioning” (3–4). In these first pages, Mifsud gently loosens rhetoric from the grip of its application. Should we not want it for our own desired ends, should we let it move, rhetoric in/as/through gift/giving gives back to us new ways of thinking about communication as in and outside of word exchange, both stirring inside and brimming over technē.Among the multiple gifts/givens that “rhetoric of and as gift” offers is that it frees us to openly explore the relationship between language and love, two creatures who have long been twisted together in the corner. Love in/for/through rhetoric is spoken just above a whisper by Mifsud (such secrecy may be well matched to the ethereal relationship she draws between rhetoric and the gift). “What Aristotle himself called happiness, Cixous, jouissance, Schrag, love, Spivak, care, and Johnstone, freedom” is draped by her more explicit elaboration of “giving rhetoric” as poiesis, creative and generative practice (11). In this vein, Mifsud gathers her chapters around three interlaced topics: 1) creative rather than technical critical orientation; 2) the gift's sacrifice for/by communication; and 3) gift/giving rhetoric as relationality that makes way for the polis. She takes up these topics through an examination of Homeric gift/givens in Aristotle's Rhetoric that have up to this point been a hushed dimension of the field's work. In so doing, Mifsud both explains (in excess) and performs (poetic) rhetoric of and as gift, giving way to a “creative consciousness, capable of what Cixous calls “Other-love” (148). In short, Mifsud's articulations of the “and” that dwells between “rhetoric and the gift” allows us as critics and citizens to imagine and practice love in language by letting whatever is other be.An aside dedicated to (the technē of) exorida, the (art of) beginning, and a moment for reaching shared understanding: it would both betray and misrepresent Mifsud's insights to here tidily align each chapter with creative historiography, sacrifice, and givens in the polis. As she is committed to letting the poetic emerge and exhibit, Mifsud's footing in her project is not steady, and the reader swerves behind her shifts. Therefore, this review wanders more thematically than chronologically. It slides amid subjects, and it invites further wandering. Yes, the task of “review” remains at hand, however the occasion calls, too, for embracing logos as “a gathering,” an “invitation to you to see what you might see, to be free, … to imagine all the more to be imagined” (55). Echoing what is familiar but doing so in a way that allows what is being said to nonetheless be experienced as new is, after all, the function of Homeric poiesis.2Mifsud continuously pronounces distinctions between creative and technical orientations, between Homeric and technical rhetoric, and so tempts her readers to believe that there must be some contest between rhetoric that is contained and rhetoric that is allowed to be in excess; however, she is very clear throughout her book that poiesis is not anti-technē. That is, poetic gifts/givens pulsate in carefully composed expressions and, at the same time, exceed them. Her traversing of these planes, as she all the while welcomes any surprise that comes from their movements, indicates a creative rather than technical orientation toward thought, language, and other, fully appreciating the gift rather than reflexively tucking it behind organization and argumentation. This is not to say that operating from a technical orientation erases the poetic; it simply emphasizes a means-to-an-end approach at the expense of letting the poetic come into view. As Mifsud puts it, technical thinking/writing/acting entails “an exacting efficiency to achieve the end of reason” without yielding to its excess (19).Mifsud articulates this difference in the first chapter through a focused comparison of how Homer and Aristotle have been historicized as rhetorical figures. Here she takes issue with technical historiographical interpretations of Homer, which depict him as “being a poet with a run-on style” and lacking rationality. Technical language reveals “a complex mind capable of abstract and critical thinking,” and thus Homer is seen as “primitive” (20). The technical historiographic interpretations of Homer are not just considered “technical” because of their emphasis on technē (for Homer's so-called failure to contribute a technē of rhetoric may be attributed to the mistake of counting him among rhetoricians to begin with) but because they measure Homer against Aristotle's view of rhetoric, certain defined preconditions for the rhetorical, and the particular demands of the polis. That is, evaluations of Homer on these grounds affirm the authority of Rhetoric and position Homer as the negative, the other whose form can only be traced recognized when aligned with what forms of rhetoric are presumed proper (21–22). Mifsud asks what an affirmative attitude toward Homer would offer to rhetoric: reconsidering Homeric gifts/giving and their relationship to language and being blends and blurs the borders of rhetoric solidified by technē, fixations on the logical, the figurative, and the representative (25–26). She spends the remaining chapters of the book performing a “creative historiographic” approach for the purposes of exploring how Homer contributes otherwise to our understanding of rhetoric. Put differently (here she borrows from Deleuze), Mifsud seeks to “deterritorialize” what we know of rhetoric, all the while appreciating that ultimately rhetoric will be “reterritorialized” by way of technē (28). “Such a creative orientation toward history and theory writing allows for rhetoric, in acknowledgment and performance of the gift, to offer a return to itself to and in excess of exchange” (30).Commitment to a creative orientation to the rhetorical calls for giving (in)to the excess of language and yielding to the multiple experiences a poetic rhetorical act makes possible; such an orientation immediately transforms the relationship the rhetor has with words, who is no longer bound up by purpose or utilization but allowed to roam. It also transforms the rhetor's relationship with the addressee for whom the words were uttered. Poiesis puts to bed any expectations that a message or meaning is transmitted or even merely “understood;” instead, language (and the other sharing in it) enjoys the loving liberty that comes from being let to be. Mifsud describes this “hospitable” rhetor in Deleuzian terms as no longer an author but a production studio undergoing wholly creative labor without method or rules (146). And, for hospitality's sake, the giving rhetor/rhetoric as gift must demand some sacrifice. Sacrifice “informs the gift and is an effect of the gift. To give requires sacrifice of some sort, for to give is to give away, to let go” (95). A creative relationship to rhetoric requires a radical openness to/with language, as it requires letting the other pull from our words whatever he or she sees in the expression without the rhetor burdening him or her with what it really means, and thus Homer is the personification of this giving.Specifically, Homer plays host to Aristotle. Homer is referred to and relied on throughout the Rhetoric, but he is not exactly paid homage (95, 100). Sacrifice explicitly requires the giving away of goods hard to come by and a giving away of self—Aristotle sacrifices Homer by “circulat[ing] only the thinnest slivers of Homeric doxa,” compressing vivid scenes from his epics into “sound bites” that fit the defined purpose of rhetorical technē (96), and by sacrificing the “poet” himself to “the new signification of rhetor, more in line with the norms and needs of classical technē” (100). Mifsud is very clear that Aristotle's sacrifice of Homer, Homeric givens, and poiesis “should not be considered an abuse of Homer. Homeric hospitality is unconcerned with exploitation by the one in receipt of its gift, and by virtue of poiesis, even though the poetic is reduced by Aristotle to prose more fitting for the technical, “we have no ‘true’ Homer' … to recover” (96). Homer, agnostic toward himself and his creation, makes his offerings without acknowledgment as such or obligation to reciprocate or to receive in any so-called appropriate manner (the sort of offering Aristotle names kharis in his Rhetoric). Aristotle's appropriation of Homer marks the taking place of giving rhetoric, and just as Homer's epics inhabit Aristotle's Rhetoric (however subtly), just as poiesis sighs between technē's articulations, the gift/giving gives rise to and nurtures the rhetorical.Nonetheless Mifsud remarks that our memory of rhetoric's foundations in the gift/giving has faded. Its appearance has been stamped over repeatedly by “procedural operation” and “technical knowledge,” even in the polis, the place where men supposedly show themselves for who they truly are (103). At this point, after insisting for over one hundred pages that poiesis has never really abandoned rhetoric, even if it just faintly glows in the face of technē, Mifsud mourns poiesis as if it has been lost, given away to the “service of technē.” Its dissolution in our interactions with others is tragic: “Things and people in a polis culture are related through distant, abstract mechanisms of power rather than personal relations, through technical proceduralism and utility more so than through hospitality and honor.” The forfeiting of the poetic to the technical not only restrains creativity capacity and limits our access to worlds yet known through language but also transforms communication from a medium through which we come to know and love the other into a barrier wedged between the self and other (103).With the erosion of rhetoric as gift/giving by “end-driven goals,” the other does not appear at all except as a commodity, one whom the rhetor seeks to win over, to persuade, to possess as a means to securing the rhetor's own ambitions and aims. In sum, rhetoric drained of the poetic, rhetoric made into merely “a technical apparatus to secure judgment,” is rhetoric drained of its ethical and genuinely political dimension (104). This dramatic warning against forgetting Homer raises some crucial questions about the polis in the midst of the field's ongoing romanticization of civic discourse, democracy, and justice. Mifsud grants that these matters are indeed worthy of attention but maintains that they neither can nor should dictate rhetoric's expanse (104). It would be fair to say that Mifsud does not ask that we abandon our idealistic vision of the polis but to embrace it more tightly, and forging such intimacy, she suggests, is possible only by recognizing the limits of technē and reaching into its excess, where the poetic lies in waiting.In the latter portion of her book, Mifsud is most lucid about the stakes of her appeals to recover rhetorical gift/giving. When the rhetorical is curbed by a sought-after result, when the other is not to be seen or acknowledged through rhetoric but possessed by it for the purpose of policy, allegiance, lawfulness, equality, and so forth, the ethical and political relations made possible in and through language are compromised. It is beside the point that these purposes may be valuable or good; “possession” is the operative phrase: renouncing Homeric poiesis directs our visions and capacities only toward a “particular order of things” at the expense of recognition of the other qua other and at the expense of recognizing language as such.3 It feels as though Mifsud is calling for rhetoricians to reclaim the poetic in order to remember rhetoric's origins in the gift, thereby radically rethinking what sort of inquiry rhetoric should take up and how we engage in our questions together through the written and spoken word. Do we revitalize the subject of style? Are we now obliged to open our understanding of publics in a way that intimates rhetoric gift/giving? Maybe. Whatever instruction Mifsud leaves to her reader is confused by her compulsory bow to Derrida's critique of gift giving (127, 139–43, 161). “The archaic Homeric gift economy is not our savior,” she assures (143).But if the rhetorical is concerned with the question of language and (love of) the other, why not heed Homer's example as host? Mifsud's most compelling contribution is a critique of the ways we indefinitely affix argument, persuasion, policy, and democracy to rhetoric's art; or, put differently, the ways in which we have only asked after how language can serve our self-determined appearances or preconceived designs and purposes. The gift/giving rhetoric requests at last (as it always has) to let the question of language—language as a question—surface, to let it shimmer in the expression of the other, to let it ring in the other's voice. True, this is a matter of love. Never mind that gifts may implicate language or the other in a reciprocal exchange. Should we be wary to let language in turn give voice? Through this thesis we approach a Levinasian dream, whereby the other finds himself in (the other's) expression, and the other is recognized in an intimate state, already giving of herself. This is not obligation so much as a joining, a touching and being touched. Mifsud is thus too humble in her final appeals: the spectacular transformation of our relationship to language that Rhetoric and the Gift performs—throwing back into question what we know/that we have ever actually known/whether we can ever know rhetoric's potential—is the necessary beginning of loving an other and of loving the world.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.51.1.0091

January 2018

  1. How To Be Gay with Locative Media: The Rhetorical Work of Grindr as a Platform
    Abstract

    “Grindr has the potentiality of being such a market-mediated counterpublic, where queers can meet in virtual space, encountering difference and developing new intimacies with each other, ones that play out both through the app and in physical space.”

  2. Editor’s Note
    Abstract

    The bouleutêrion (the council house or assembly hall) was the meeting place of the council of citizens in ancient Greece under democracy. The architecture of bouleutêria has been less studied than has the architecture of theaters and religious monuments. The standard study remains William McDonald’s The Political Meeting Places of the Greeks (Johns Hopkins University Press), published in 1943. The study by Christopher Lyle Johnstone and Richard J. Graff that follows here builds on McDonald’s work but analyzes bouleutêria from a distinctly rhetorical perspective: in “Situating Deliberative Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: The Bouleutêrion as a Venue for Oratorical Performance,” they study bouleutêria from the perspective of places of oratorical performance. Theirs is the first study of oratorical sites in ancient Greece that includes both computer-generated reconstructions of the sites, enabling scholars to evaluate sightlines, and technical acoustical analysis, permitting judgments of what was likely heard from particular locations in a particular bouleutêrion. The increased interest in the material conditions of oratorical performances among rhetoric scholars and the uniqueness of Johnstone and Graff’s approach led to the decision to devote virtually this entire issue to their study. The responses to Johnstone and Graff by two scholars, Peter O’Connell, Classics, University of Georgia and author of The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (University of Texas Press, 2017), and James Fredel, English, Ohio State University and author of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Performance from Solon to Demosthenes (Southern Illinois, 2006) complement Johnstone and Graff’s study.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1419742
  3. Facing the Challenges of Reconstructing Ancient Buildings
    Abstract

    Johnstone and Graff’s contribution to what they term the “archaeology” of Greek rhetoric is original and significant. By describing the visual and acoustic characteristics of bouleutêrion interiors, they help us to imagine the experiences of both speaker and audience in these spaces. Speeches before boulai could have been performative tours de force. Orators could have taken advantage of the settings to enhance their words’ persuasive force, to present themselves in competition as confident, powerful men, and, perhaps, to generate particular aesthetic effects. Johnstone and Graff’s approach reflects the contemporary trend of trying to situate ancient performance texts within the physical locations for which they were composed. Probably the most successful example of this is Bissera Pentcheva’s work on Hagia Sophia. Pentcheva and her colleagues have demonstrated how the acoustic properties of Hagia Sophia, particularly its reverberation time, would have affected the experiences of hearing and performing hymns, psalms, and the sung sermons known as kontakia during the Justinianic liturgy of the sixth century CE. Hagia Sophia lends itself to this kind of research, since the complete building survives, as does a large and varied corpus of texts written about it or for performance within it. Johnstone and Graff’s project faces the opposite situation. None of the dozens of known bouleutêria survives as anything approaching a complete building, and we have limited specific evidence of what went on within them. This essay considers Johnstone and Graff’s analysis in light of these two challenges.All the bouleutêria Johnstone and Graff discuss are in more-or-less ruined condition. Sufficient remains of the foundations of the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens survive for us to reconstruct the buildings’ dimensions and floor plans, but we have limited evidence about the heights and materials of the walls and roof and the materials of interior surfaces. It is not even clear whether there were wooden benches for the bouleutai to sit on. Other buildings are better preserved. For the bouleutêrion of Miletus, for instance, we know that the seats and walls were of marble and limestone, and we can reconstruct the exterior walls’ height with reasonable accuracy. Even for the best preserved bouleutêria, fundamental architectural details, including the presence of windows and the materials and pitch of the roof, are matters of speculation. The state of the buildings has important consequences for acoustic analysis, as the example of reverberation time will show.Reverberation time is a measure of how long it takes a sound to die away. Some materials, such as cloth, absorb sound and hasten its decay. Other materials, such as brick or solid wood, reflect sound and prolong its reverberation. To calculate the reverberation time of any room, therefore, we need to know the materials and surface area of every surface that sound could encounter within it, including the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture. We also need to know the volume of the room. This poses a challenge for bouleutêria. The Old Bouleuterion in Athens is a representative example. Since we do not know the height of the Old Bouleuterion, we cannot calculate with certainty its volume or the surface area of its walls and roof. Chips of yellow poros suggest that the walls were of this material, but neither the walls themselves nor traces of any of the interior furniture survive (Thompson 129–132). Accordingly, Johnstone and Graff have to make inferences about the height and the material of interior surfaces in order to calculate reverberation time. They estimate a wall height of 6 m and a roof peak height of 9.3 m. Different heights would change both the volume and surface areas, and so would result in different reverberation times. In Appendix A, Table 1, Johnstone and Graff base their calculations on “absorption coefficients that most closely resemble the building materials used.” As with the height, if we posit different materials, the reverberation times would change. Other measures, including speech intelligibility, also depend on height and materials. The presence or absence of windows can affect acoustic conditions as well. Georgios Karadedos, Vasilios Zafranas, and Panagiotis Karampatzakis, who have calculated the reverberation times of some Greek bouleutêria and ôdeia, although with very different results from Johnstone and Graff, note that open windows in their reconstruction of the Odeion of Aphrodisias would reduce reverberation time by 20 percent. When Johnstone and Graff praise the acoustics of the Old Bouleuterion, therefore, their conclusion is a possibility rather than a certainty. They are referring to their reconstruction of the building rather than the building itself. The same holds for other bouleutêria. For the bouleutêrion at Messene, for instance, Johnstone and Graff’s calculations depend on a reconstructed wall height of 17 m and a roof peak height of 20.3 m. All of Johnstone and Graff’s assumptions are reasonable, but results based on information that we do not know must always be used with caution.Even though Johnstone and Graff’s results may be uncertain in particulars, they point to conclusions that are generally correct. Greek bouleutêria, especially those whose shapes resemble the Old or New Bouleuterion in Athens, were effective performance spaces for both visual and acoustic reasons. The Greeks themselves seem to have appreciated the functionality of the Old and New Bouleuteria, since, of all the monumental civic and religious buildings of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, their architecture was the most consistently imitated. This contrasts with another Athenian building that hosted oratorical performances, the Odeion of Pericles. Modeled after Xerxes’ tent, it did not become the model for later ôdeia (Camp 347), perhaps because its many columns and sloping, peaked roof impeded visibility and resulted in poor acoustics, especially compared to the simple box-like shapes of the Old and New Bouleuteria.Research on bouleutêria faces a second central challenge besides the scanty archaeological remains. While we know these buildings housed councils of various sorts throughout the Greek world from the archaic through late antique periods, we have little idea of how these councils actually conducted their business. This is particularly true of Hellenistic cities, but it is also true of Classical Athens. We know much about the Athenian boulê’s responsibilities and procedures, but we do not know what the bouleutai did in the buildings we call the Old and New Bouleuteria and what they did elsewhere. The boulê met almost every day. Its published agendas always included the location of the meeting (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 43.3), and that location may have changed often. As Johnstone and Graff note, inscriptions and literary references attest to the Athenian boulê meeting in various places. Similarly, according to Xenophon’s Hellenica 5.2.29, the Theban boulê would meet in a stoa when its usual meeting place on the hill known as the Cadmea was being used for another purpose, and Christopher P. Dickenson (115) infers from two accounts of the same event in Plutarch’s Life of Aratus 40.2–3 and Life of Cleomenes 19.1 that the Corinthian boulê could meet in the Temple of Apollo, even though there was a bouleutêrion in Corinth (Diodorus Siculus 16.65.6).We need to be cautious about references to bouleutêria in ancient sources, since bouleutêrion is both a general and specific term. In Athens, it can refer to the particular buildings that we call the Old and New Bouleuteria, but any other place that any boulê meets is also a bouleutêrion. Hence, there was a bouleutêrion on the Areopagus for the boulê of the Areopagus (Lalonde). Any building where a boulê was meeting could probably be designated a temporary bouleutêrion, just as a stoa could become a dikastêrion while it was being used for trials. Along the same lines, at least some of the buildings designated as bouleutêria would have hosted events besides meetings of the boulê, since, as a general rule, Greek buildings were designed for multiple purposes. As Johnstone and Graff point out, the Old Bouleuterion may have simultaneously housed both the boulê and Athens’ archives. This affects how we think of bouleutêria as venues for oratorical performances. While there can be no question that they did host oratory, we cannot be sure of what else they were used for or how often speeches took place within them, as opposed to alternative meeting places of boulai.By emphasizing oratorical performances in bouleutêria, Johnstone and Graff’s analysis leaves questions about boulê procedure and the buildings’ other purposes unanswered. How often would speakers who were capable of the kind of performances that Johnstone and Graff envision have had the opportunity to speak in bouleutêria? How would the architectural characteristics that made bouleutêria excellent spaces for oratory have affected the other activities that occurred within them, such as subcommittee meetings or debates like the one in Lysias 22, Against the Graindealers, that Johnstone and Graff mention? What was more central to bouleutêria’s roles, their acoustics or the unimpeded sight lines from almost anywhere inside them? In the rest of this essay, I consider Johnstone and Graff’s analysis from the broad perspective of these questions. I will not offer answers, which is probably impossible based on our evidence, but I will show that reconstructions of bouleutêria need to account for other activities just as prominently as for deliberative oratory. Even though Johnstone and Graff do not specifically address other activities, their study points to how bouleutêria would have been more than simply venues for speechmaking. I will focus particularly on Athens, since we know more about the Athenian boulê than the boulai of other cities.Plato’s Gorgias, who surely has Athens in mind, defines rhêtorikê as “the ability to persuade with words dikastai in a dikastêrion, bouleutai in a bouleutêrion, and ekklêsiastai in an ekklêsia, as well as in any other type of political meeting” (452e, my trans.). The Athenian boulê acted as a kind of gatekeeper for the ekklêsia, setting the agenda of topics for each meeting. An item placed on the ekklêsia’s agenda was called a “preliminary resolution,” or probouleuma. Speakers could influence Athenian policy by successfully persuading the bouleutai to pass probouleumata recommending their pet causes. Since the ekklêsia appears to have approved the boulê’s recommendations without changes about half the time (Rhodes 79), a politician who was skilled at manipulating the boulê could wield considerable influence over the policies of Athens. Debates over probouleumata probably attracted the kinds of trained orators that Johnstone and Graff envision taking advantage of the acoustic conditions of the Old and New Bouleuteria. In the Sausage Seller’s description of a chaotic meeting of the boulê in Aristophanes’ Knights, we hear that Paphlagon was “booming with words that struck like thunderbolts” and “hurling mountain crags” at the bouleutai (626–629, my trans.). Although exaggerated for comic effect, this gives us a taste of the kind of oratory that politicians such as Cleon would have practiced before the boulê in the 420s BCE.There were other opportunities for oratorical performance before the boulê besides debates over probouleumata. The boulê had the power to conduct certain types of judicial hearings, most importantly dokimasiai, or “examinations,” of magistrates who were about to take office, as well as of invalids seeking public support. Dokimasiai took the form of trials. The people objecting to the appointment spoke first, and then the prospective officials defended themselves. Of the five surviving speeches that were delivered before the Athenian boulê, four come from dokimasiai (Lys. 16, 24, 26, 31) and one from another type of judicial hearing (Dem. 51). Dokimasiai would have been ideal occasions for what Johnstone and Graff term the “performance of masculine virtue and virtuosity in a competitive culture that prized honor and reputation.” Prospective magistrates and bouleutai had to justify not only their qualifications but also their lifestyles and habits. For instance, in Lysias 16, For Mantitheus, Mantitheus defends his appearance and reputation as an orator and responds to the charge that he served in the cavalry under the Thirty Tyrants.We should not exaggerate the importance of oratory in dokimasiai. Most of the hundreds of hearings the boulê had to conduct each year must have been resolved with rapid approvals or rejections and minimal speechmaking. Furthermore, whenever the boulê acted as a court, we do not know whether it even met in the Old or New Bouleuterion. Pollux 8.86 says that the dokimasiai of archons took place in the Stoa Basileos (Rhodes 36), and the manuscripts of Lysias 31.1 refer to a dikastêrion rather than a bouleutêrion. While the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens, therefore, seem to have served as venues for oratorical performances during discussions of probouleumata, the boulê seems to have been convened in other places on at least some occasions that may have featured competitive oratory.Even during political debates, prominent politicians could not address the boulê whenever they wished, since only the bouleutai themselves had an absolute right to speak (Rhodes 42–43). As a result, politicians sometimes pursued policy goals through behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Demosthenes (23.9,14), Aeschines (3.125), and the pseudo-Aristotelian Athênainôn Politeia (29.1–3) all describe politicians advancing policies through personal relationships (Rhodes 57). As Josiah Ober has argued, the boulê of the fifth and fourth centuries functioned through a series of interlocking social networks that recognized and relied on individuals’ connections and expertise (142–155). Ober calls this process “knowledge aggregation.” The aggregated knowledge of the boulê and its constituent social networks would have served as a check on the power of rhetoric. When bouleutai voted, their decisions were informed both by the speeches they had heard and by the informed opinions of their expert colleagues. Both the Old and New Bouleuteria, as Johnstone and Graff have reconstructed them, would have facilitated this kind of informed voting. By sitting, or perhaps standing, in what Ober (199–205) calls “inward facing circles,” the bouleutai could have observed each other as they listened to speeches and so reached judgments informed by the reactions of their colleagues. The open space that facilitated oratory would also have encouraged visual communication among listeners and so prevented orators from having too much power.The boulê oversaw many Athenian officials, especially those concerned with finances and the navy. One of the boulê’s most important roles was to supervise monetary transactions. For instance, in the fifth century the boulê observed the presentation of tribute from the allies (Meiggs and Lewis 46), and in the fourth century they watched in the bouleutêrion as the debts of individuals who had paid the money they owed to the state were formally erased from the written record (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 48.1). Duties such as these required seeing as much as hearing, which again indicates that visibility would have been as important as audibility to the design of Athenian bouleutêria. The open space of the Old and New Bouleuteria probably encouraged small meetings of subcommittees as well as mass viewing, especially if there were movable wooden benches. By the fourth century, the boulê conducted much of its supervisory business through subcommittees (Rhodes 143).The Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens were multipurpose buildings whose design facilitated a range of activities besides oratory. We know much less about the business conducted in bouleutêria outside Athens, but they also seem to have hosted both political oratory and other events, some of which had nothing to do with speaking or governing.Inscriptions and literary references make clear that boulai throughout the Greek-speaking world played an active role in political decisions, sometimes through listening to speeches. Polybius, for instance, describes a debate that took place in 226 or 225 BCE in the koinon, here “shared” or “federal,” bouleutêrion of the Achaean League, which was probably in Aegium, on the Gulf of Corinth. At this meeting, envoys of the Megalopolitans read a letter from the Macedonian king Antigonus Doson and urged the representatives of the league to make an alliance with him, but the general Aratus responded “at length,” urging them to continue acting on their own for the time being. The “crowd applauded” Aratus’ speech and accepted his recommendation (2.50.10–51.1). Polybius also paraphrases a speech of the general Philopoemen given in what was probably the same bouleutêrion in 208 or 207 BCE (11.9.1–9), which criticizes the soldiers of the Achaean League for neglecting their armor and weaponry in favor of fancy dress.By the imperial period, bouleutêria hosted performances besides political oratory, including epideictic oratory and musical concerts. Libanius describes the enthusiastic reception that greeted him when he spoke in the bouleutêrion in his hometown of Antioch in 353 CE (Autobiography 87–89), and Dio of Prusa (19.2–3) describes the performance of a lyre player in the bouleutêrion in Cyzicus sometime between 85 and 95 CE. While Libanius and other epideictic speakers probably benefited from the same architectural conditions that Johnstone and Graff show favored deliberative speakers, a focus on oratory alone does not address whether bouleuêtria would also have been effective performance spaces for singers and instrumentalists. Did the buildings host concerts because their acoustics were good for music as well as speech or simply because they were available?Some bouleutêria accommodated events unrelated to government or to individual performances. To take one example, Josephus tells us that the same building in Tiberias was used both for formal political meetings of the Tiberian boulê, complete with oratory and debates, and as a proseukhê, “prayer-house” or “synagogue” (Life 276–298, Rocca 296–300). Other synagogues of the late Second Temple period seem to have been modeled after Hellenistic bouleutêria such as the ones at Priene and Miletus that Johnstone and Graff discuss (Ma‘oz 41, Rocca 305–310). This suggests that the architectural characteristics that Johnstone and Graff associate primarily with oratory would also have been appropriate for the non-oratorical activities in synagogues, the of the the of the and outside and, especially after public while Johnstone and Graff’s specific results need to be used with their analysis of the performance conditions of bouleutêria how skilled orators could have used these buildings to their in the that a At the same time, Johnstone and Graff’s focus on oratory the of their every speech before a boulê would have been delivered in a bouleutêrion, bouleutai had many responsibilities that did not call for and bouleutêria were used for besides boulê The physical characteristics of bouleutêria in Athens and throughout the Greek-speaking world that Johnstone and Graff would have accommodated a range of besides oratorical including visual small musical performances, and religious based on Johnstone and Graff’s may us how the architecture of bouleutêria would have facilitated or these at the of well late because they were multipurpose buildings to many of civic to and whose an of this essay, and to who my to ancient

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1419745

December 2017

  1. Antiguos y modernos en la obra retórica y oratoria de Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594): tonitrua cum fulgure
    Abstract

    In this paper we attempt to identify the traces of the past in the rhetorical writings and sermons by Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594), probably the most popular Italian preacher in the Cinquecento. Our aim is to highlight some aspects of his rhetorical background, trying to show that he draws not only on Classical and Christian models but also on contemporary ones. In fact, as we shall make clear, Panigarola's theoretical principles and his own preaching are the result of the harmonization of Classical and Christian models with the new demands of ecclesiastical rhetoric and oratory in the Counter Reformation period.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0022
  2. The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity by Cristina Pepe
    Abstract

    Reviews Cristina Pepe, The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. xviii + 618 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-24984-4 When I review a book that is of high quality, I like to read it twice before submitting the review. That does not excuse the inordinate length of time it has taken me to review Cristina Pepe's Genres of Rhetorical Speeches, for which I apologise to the author, but it immediately indicates my admiration for the book. I shall outline its contents, before making a few observations, all of which are offered in a constructive spirit. The book consists (suitably, given its theme) of three parts, followed by an extensive list of Testimonia, an Appendix, Bibliography, Index of Greek and Latin Terms, Index Locorum, and a General Index. Part One covers the fifth and fourth centuries, opening with an overview of the contexts of speechmaking in Greece and, of course, in particular Athens. Separate chapters address the practice of the Sophists (with an inevitable focus on Gorgias and the Helen, supplemented by observations on the ori­ gins of the praise speech); Thucydides (deliberative oratory, with an anal­ ysis of the Mytilenean Debate in Book 3); Plato (analyses of the Gorgias, Phaedrus and Sophist, and of Plato's conception of advice and praise); Isocrates (in particular how he defines his logoi); Demosthenes (his distinc­ tion between deliberative and judicial); and, in greater detail, the Rhetoric to Alexander (with a discussion of genres and species, and of the connected and complex ascription of the treatise to Anaximenes, without committing herself either way). Part Two is of roughly the same length as Part One, but focuses on one author only: Aristotle. Rhetorical development, including in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrian, all led to the Rhetoric, which for Pepe was Greek rhetoric's 'crowning theoretical achievement' (p. 123; I note that this repeats the earlier judgment of Laurent Pernot in the English translation of his Rhetoric in Antiquity, 'the crowning achievement of rhetorical theory in Classical Greece', p. 41), though the dates of composition of the Rhetoric to Alexander and the Rhetoric were not necessarily linear. Most will not quib­ ble with Pepe's concentration on the Rhetoric, even if we need to bear in mind Pernot's assessment that 'this treatise full of novel views was rela­ tively little read in antiquity' (Rhetoric in Antiquity p. 44). Pepe examines Rhetorica, Vol. XXXV, Issue 1, pp. 110-120. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2017 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: / /www.ucpress. edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.L110. Reviews 111 the system of genres in the Rhetoric in minute and instructive detail, pay­ ing a great deal of attention to epideictic, which Rhetoric scholars agree Aristotle introduced 'as a genre in its own right' (p. 144), but also indicat­ ing the 'aspects of originality with respect to tradition' of his treatment of the deliberative genre (p. 159). Very helpful chapters on the different topics that are used in the three genres (Chapter Twelve), and on the style and arrangement of the genres (Chapter Thirteen), precede a final chapter in this Part on the relatively little-studied treatise, the Divisiones Aristoteleae. Part Three takes us through the Hellenistic period and into Rome (the title Rhetorical Genres in the Hellenistic and Imperial Ages' perhaps does not do full justice to the material on the Roman Republican period). This might be thought the least satisfying of the three parts, not because of any lack of knowledge, hut simply because it covers, inevitably in less detail, such a wide range of material, in Greek and Tatin, from Hellenistic theory to the proyyninasmata and declamation (Chapter Twenty). There is thus no individual chapter on Cicero or Quintilian, rather an approach that looks at topics from a combined Greek and Roman angle, such as the vocabulary used for each of the three genres...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0025
  3. Demagogic Style and Historical Method: Locating Cleon’s Mytilenean Rhetoric (Thucydides 3.37–40)
    Abstract

    Truth-construction and -mediation are theorized both by Thucydides xyngrapheus and by the internal rhetores in his History, with tensions between these perspectives highlighting rhetorically significant moments of political communication. The historian posits the (negative) configuration “contest - pleasure - hearing - untruth - useless” as contrastive foil to his own model of “rigorous enquiry - pleasure disavowed - seeing - truth - useful.” Cleon the demagogue, in a process of rhetorical “contaminatio” or creative fusion, artfully (mis)appropriates and instrumentalizes this model in his critique of Athenian assembly culture, embedding the signature Thucydidean categories in a spirited anti-Thucydidean argument. His distinctive approach, conflating Thucydidean categories and noteworthy Peri-clean echoes, marks him as both anti-Pericles and anti-Thucydides, and signals a counter-model to the historian’s own schema of truth-construction. As such, Cleon’s tirade fits into the History’s wider concern with the corruption of political discourse over the course of the war.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0021

November 2017

  1. Money, Relativism, and the Post-Truth Political Imaginary
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT Walter Benjamin's warning against unphilosophical “astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible” has new urgency in the face of real estate developer and reality-show host Donald Trump's surprise victory in the presidential election of 2016. Philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist Georg Simmel's 1900 magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, provides valuable orientation at a moment when the expectation that public discourse must be oriented by norms of truth and accuracy is under siege—not least by those who ascended to power openly denigrating the value of expertise and the specialized knowledge long regarded as essential to modern government. Trump has an instinctive grasp of Simmel's decisive insight that “money is the strongest and most immediate symbol” of the cynical truism that “the only absolute is the relativity of things.” Situating philosophy at the limits of disciplinary ways of knowing, the Philosophy of Money develops a modernist, performative strategy of thought that turns relativity into a philosophical resource. It can help us to counter the dissolution of the ideal of veracity in an era of absolutized marketing by disentangling thought from narratives of rational progress that obscure its opposite and interrogating the limitations of the professionalized ordering of knowledge practices in which expertise continues to be produced and maintained. Simmel's strategy for embracing the fragmentation, multiplicity, and uncertainty of human experience may thereby help us address the complexity and ambiguity of a historical situation growing increasingly surreal as techno-scientific progress goes hand in hand with post-truth politics.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.50.4.0483

September 2017

  1. The Rhetorical Education of William Jennings Bryan: Isocrates, Character, and Imitation
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1371654
  2. Enargeia , Persuasion, and the Vividness Effect in Athenian Forensic Oratory
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This essay argues that enargeia, the “vivid” quality of language that encourages listeners or readers to develop mental images, was an integral element of rhetorical strategy in the courts of Classical Athens. It relies on ancient evidence and modern comparanda. Ancient rhetorical theorists demonstrate how enargeia would have contributed to a sense of presence and simulated in Athenian jurors an experience similar to that of actual eyewitnesses. Modern lawyers and authors of trial handbooks advise litigators to appeal to their jurors’ imaginations with language that recalls ancient descriptions of enargeia and the related concept phantasia, “imagination.” The results of modern psychology research into the “vividness effect,” especially the distinction between figural and ground vividness, show how enargeia may have increased the likelihood of Athenian jurors accepting an argument. Lysias deploys ground vividness in On the Death of Eratosthenes (1) to draw his jurors’ attention away from the question of entrapment and figural vividness in Against Eratosthenes (12) to focus their attention on the crimes of the Thirty Tyrants. Finally, Aeschines’ description of the Thebans’ sufferings in Against Ctesiphon (3) may have harmed his case by emphasizing a weak point through misplaced figural vividness.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1384766
  3. Making Visual Rhetoric More Difficult
    Abstract

    In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1385247
  4. Rhetorical Accretion and Rhetorical Criticism in William Hazlitt’s Eloquence of the British Senate
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT This paper examines William Hazlitt’s collection, Eloquence of the British Senate (1807), alongside our interest in reception, accretion, and the rhetorical culture of Parliament. I trace Hazlitt’s interpretation of oratory, including his analysis of remediated, printed speech. Hazlitt investigates the circulation and power of oratory in modern print culture, while beginning a multidisciplinary, career-long interest in rhetoric. By mapping how Hazlitt criticizes the status quo while avoiding partisan exposes of corruption, I argue he thinks like a critical rhetorician in ways that enrich our histories of nineteenth-century rhetoric and help us reflect on our own enterprise as historians of rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1384767
  5. Author Response
    Abstract

    The most important thing to say here is thank you: thanks to Heather Hayes, Rosa Eberly, Tim Barney, and Nate Atkinson for so thoroughly and graciously engaging with my work. Thanks to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, which more than any other disciplinary organization with which I have been associated has been the source of so many of my “ah ha!” moments. And thanks to rhetorical studies in the United States more broadly, which affords me and many others intellectual and critical space to move. The Iconoclastic Imagination, as my commentators note here, ranges widely. In its scope, and not just its methods, it is a product of a paideia in the house of many rooms that is United States rhetorical studies. I am grateful.I must confess that, as I read responses and reviews, I am still learning about The Iconoclastic Imagination. It is a book, as Professor Eberly knows, that was long in developing. While clear in its basic arguments, it is also a book that you have to deliberately work your way through. As a reviewer in American Quarterly recently wrote: O’Gorman stresses at the outset that The Iconoclastic Imagination is not a “history” of neoliberalism in a conventional sense. There is therefore no overarching narrative to his exploration of different moments of catastrophe in the twentieth century. Instead, he offers a series of essays that, together, argue that the neoliberal imaginary “entails a discourse of transcendence that appeals to invisible, unrepresentable orders as the overarching means of organizing and safeguarding [American] society” (xi). It is an intellectual history, but also a history of state policy during the Cold War. It is a history of media, but also of political economy. It dabbles in the minutiae of film analysis, and it meanders from Byzantine iconography and Protestant iconoclasm through Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime. It dizzies readers so that they might orient themselves in a free-floating neoliberal imaginary. It demands complete attention. If O’Gorman’s narrative approach seems at times bewildering, if it seems to dwell too often in the weeds or the clouds, the book is functioning as intended. (157-158)When I first read these words, I laughed out loud. It was a laugh of uncanny recognition, of surprise that another recognized in this project that I had been living with for so long my own artistic as well as intellectual aims. In fact, I did treat The Iconoclastic Imagination as a work of art, of rhetorical art. Its “bewildering” quality was in fact intentional—an effort at rhetorical iconicity in the way that Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs wrote about it back in 1990 (“Words Most Like Things: Iconicity in the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, 1990). But this “intentionality” is probably less a product of my rhetorical intentions than a reflection of my own attempts to come to terms with the bewildering quality of “neoliberalism” as both a critical term and as a political, economic, and cultural formation. The Iconoclastic Imagination is a book of essays precisely because it is an exploration, maybe even an investigation. As a friend of mine who is a Special Agent with the F.B.I. says, bewilderment can be a means of understanding what the hell is going on.Speaking of the F.B.I. and bewilderment, I want to focus the rest of this response on guns, a topic Professor Eberly raised in thinking about The Iconoclastic Imagination. Professor Barney wonders about the role of “the more quotidian rhetorical events of the Cold War play in the perpetuation of a neoliberal imaginary,” noting that The Iconoclastic Imagination does not address the “gaps” between the extraordinary or epochal events it investigates. He is definitely right about the gaps in my book. And if I were to try to fill them in, I would need to take on the quotidian interregnums between the “where-were-you-when?” events I examine. Guns, in fact, are a good place start. Guns are not only pervasive in American culture, they negotiate, on a day-to-day basis, many of the political issues I explore in my book: legitimacy, nationhood, nationalism, national politics, political representation, nature/artifice, and order.Professor Eberly points to the way in which guns circulate in American political culture as a counter-democratic, perhaps even counter-revolutionary, force. Much of The Iconoclastic Imagination is concerned with the sublime, an aesthetic that in the eighteenth-century was a means of rhetorically negotiating revolution and counter-revolution. The sublime, as I suggest in the book, is not just a rhetoric and aesthetic of transcendence, but marks limits and thresholds—that is, it is a rhetoric of limits. In the longer arc of American history, it seems to me that guns have stood as icons of the threshold of political legitimacy. As a revolutionary nation, the United States has long been a nation wherein political legitimacy hangs, like a loose chad, from the ballot. The bullet, in turn, is kept on reserve for a revolutionary function when the sovereign, the state, or the system is deemed illegitimate. Of course, this ballot-and-bullet logic stands at another threshold integral to The Iconoclastic Imagination, that between the American social imaginary and the actual operations of the American state. Guns, as Professor Eberly suggests, form a copia of cultural imaginaries that go well beyond Mayberry, and even the NRA: freedom fighters, survivalists, mafia bosses, kingpins, gangbangers, weekend outdoorsmen, James Bond, cops, and so on. Guns also, especially when amplified into bombs and missiles, have been a primary means of American global power since the middle of the twentieth century. Arms are, in this sense, “icons” of America, images that point beyond themselves without annihilating their own representational integrity. But this means that guns are not really sublime, but mundane.Yet, part of the pacifying quality of neoliberal discourse, and part of its ideological function, is to tell us that what I have just articulated is all wrong: arms aren’t really integral to American power or political culture, but rather part of the nation’s necessary emergency reserve. The essence of America is found instead in its economic productivity, or “freedom.” In this sense, neoliberalism entails an elite discourse positioned against “populist” elements that continue to insist on the primary Hobbesian natural right of self-preservation vis-à-vis guns. Neoliberalism would transform these gun-wielding citizens into participants in the “labor market” as part of a national project in pacification under the conditions of globalization. To which, in a kind of reversal of the ballot-and-bullet logic, these gun-wielding citizens approach the ballot as a kind of emergency reserve by which to protect their natural right to the bullet: and so, we have the NRA, Donald Trump, and now, perhaps, Neil Gorsuch.I think Professor Atkinson is quite right to draw our attention to indexes so as to better orient collective action in bewildering times. Guns, to be sure, are indexes of shifts in American political and economic culture. Gun ownership is rapidly becoming what Hobbes would call a natural right. Guns are, as Professor Atkinson suggests, “signs linked to their objects by causal connection.” My point in The Iconoclastic Imagination was not to cast doubt on the political potential of indexes so much as to argue that within the parameters of the neoliberal imaginary indexicality cannot be taken for granted—that it, like normative versions of rhetoric, depends on certain cultural and political conditions in order to survive, let alone to thrive. So, I would join Professor Atkinson in his call to citizen-critics (a phrase I first learned from Professor Eberly) to “direct our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation.” Guns and arms are an important place to look. I would only insist that we recognize just how difficult such looking is under neoliberal conditions. It can be downright bewildering.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1385258
  6. The Pedagogical Implications of Teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for Global Public Rhetorics and Civic Action in the U.S. Writing Classroom
    Abstract

    This essay focuses on the pedagogical implications of teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of global rhetorics in the U.S. writing classroom. We propose that the public work of rhetorical instruction includes helping students develop as global citizen leaders by allowing them to explore and critically become aware of various national cultures and rhetorical traditions across the world. Integrating non-Western public rhetorics into the U.S. writing classroom challenges students in this context to write outside of the classical conventions of rhetoric and affords students to mobilize a new discourse for civic action.

    doi:10.59236/rjv17i2pp69-94

August 2017

  1. Vol. 6.2: Rhetorics, Politics, Technologies
    Abstract

    “Our new issue features articles on such a range of research, it’s hard to write about them all at once. Articles here focus on pedagogy, students’ rights, investigations of public rhetorics, and the political and social impact of rhetorical choices.”

  2. The Artistry of Civil Life: Deliberative Rhetoric and Political Pedagogy in the Work of Nicolaus Vernulaeus (1583–1649)*
    Abstract

    Attempting to re-invigorate classical deliberative oratory, the Leuven professor of rhetoric Nicolaus Vernulaeus developed a new kind of political eloquence adapted to the needs of counsellors and diplomats working in the service of a monarch. In the present article we shall highlight his largely forgotten contribution to late humanist rhetorical theory and practice. We shall try to show that his rhetorical programme was based on a cogent, pointedly rhetorical view of political life. By analyzing the student orations which were composed under his guidance and subsequently published by him, we shall furthermore try to demonstrate that his training programme was consistent and practical, some striking discrepancies between theory and practice notwithstanding.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2017.35.3.259
  3. Augmented Vélorutionaries: Digital Rhetoric, Memorials, and Public Discourse
    Abstract

    Ghost bikes function as MEmorials, or a public acknowledgement of the unspoken costs of petrocultural values. However, ghost bikes are temporary monuments: they are often stolen or taken down by public authorities within just a few days or weeks after their installation. We created the mobile augmented reality experience “Death Drive(r)s: Ghost Bike (Monu)mentality” to visualize MEmorials of ghost bikes digitally.

July 2017

  1. The Necessity of Demonstrating Respect for the Sacred. An Attempt at Justification
    Abstract

    The article attempts to define the sacred as a symbol which is cognizable by the senses and which connects a human being with the divine reality. The sacred has two dimensions which indicate its ontological otherness and its integrating and standard-setting function. Separation of the sacred sphere from the public sphere renders the sacred to be worthy of respect and, at the same time, not to be subjected to any interference by unauthorized individuals and institutions. Taking care of the sacrum emphasizes the sublimity of this reality and provides for the respect towards those sharing the faith in the sacred. Preserving and promoting the significance of the sacred in human life aims at protecting spiritual sensitivity to good and beauty that motivates a human being to take noble actions and inspires him to adopt the attitudes characterized by love and service. The faith and the sacred sphere should be defended, above all, by the testimony given in words and actions, aimed at showing and justifying the rationality of the given deeds and service expressingand promoting love.

    doi:10.29107/rr2017.3.3
  2. The Religious Rhetoric of Anti-Trump Evangelicals in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
    Abstract

    This essay examines three arguments made by anti-Trump evangelical Christians in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. By explicating the arguments from character, policy, and evangelical witness, I show how this group of minority rhetors – a minority both within American evangelicalism and within the American electorate at large – used their minority status to project a prophetic warning against the Trump candidacy and in so doing developed a rhetoric that was politically potent while remaining faithful to evangelical theology and history. Paradoxically, it was by losing the election that these anti-Trump rhetors won the opportunity to articulate clearly and forcefully an evangelical political rhetoric and an implicit policy agenda.

    doi:10.29107/rr2017.2.1
  3. Science and the Religious Rhetorics of the Ineffable: A Comparison Between Two "Cosmoses"
    Abstract

    Since Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary look at the social construction of science, research into the rhetorics of science has shown how science is a persuasive form of discourse, rarely as transparent and self-evident as is often understood. Rhetorical studies have taken this cue to examine how science is constructed through available means beyond mere logic. Arguably, the resurgence of creationist beliefs in political discourse has brought on a new impetus in science to persuade the “hearts and minds” of the American population, inspiring Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remaking of Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary Cosmos. Using Rudolph Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy, this article will define religion as an ineffable experience that creates “creature-consciousness,” or a sense of awe and insufficiency towards something outside the self, while also producing a sense of identification or “oneness.” The ineffable experience is core to the public making of science, just as the ineffable experience plays a defining role in religions. Though science and religion are often seen as mutually exclusively (sometimes in opposition), identifying the ineffable experience as a shared ground can provide opportunities for science and religion to dialogue in new ways.

    doi:10.29107/rr2017.2.2
  4. Rhetoric for English Language Learners: Language Features of Five Latter-day Saint Devotional Talks
    Abstract

    Every year selected leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) speak to large audiences for regular devotional meetings at Brigham Young University, a private religious college in Provo, Utah. This study investigates the possibility that a rhetorical analysis of devotional speakers could be an effective way to observe typical language features in English public speaking that would be especially helpful for advanced English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students in improving their comprehension and expression skills. Using published transcripts and cassette tape recordings of these Latter-day Saint discourses, the analysis includes lexical, figurative, syntactic, schematic, tonal, and semantic aspects of each devotional speech. The results suggest that such religious discourses contain language details and rhetorical patterns in English that ESL students could learn to recognize, understand, and use persuasively.

    doi:10.29107/rr2017.2.4

June 2017

  1. Women’s Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories by Tarez Samra Graban
    Abstract

    368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0012
  2. The Artistry of Civil Life. Deliberative Rhetoric and Political Pedagogy in the Work of Nicolaus Vernulaeus (1583–1649)
    Abstract

    Attempting to re-invigorate classical deliberative oratory, the Leuven professor of rhetoric Nicolaus Vernulaeus developed a new kind of political eloquence adapted to the needs of counsellors and diplomats working in the service of a monarch. In the present article we shall highlight his largely forgotten contribution to late humanist rhetorical theory and practice. We shall try to show that his rhetorical programme was based on a cogent, pointedly rhetorical view of political life. By analyzing the student orations which were composed under his guidance and subsequently published by him, we shall furthermore try to demonstrate that his training programme was consistent and practical, some striking discrepancies between theory and practice notwithstanding.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0007
  3. Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise by Laurent Pernot
    Abstract

    370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar­ ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi­ deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour­ ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri­ umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin­ ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe­ cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2017.0013
  4. Fixating on the Stasis of Fact: Debating “Having It All” in U.S. Media
    Abstract

    Abstract Drawing on stasis theory, this essay explores how the debate frame functions within U.S. journalism. Using the news coverage of Marissa Mayer’s coinciding pregnancy and promotion to Yahoo! CEO and the reportage of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming grandchild during the 2016 precampaign as case studies, I develop a two-part argument. First, by analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms within this media debate, I demonstrate how the debate frame makes facts themselves infinitely debatable, thereby stagnating this public debate at the stasis of fact. This ultimately perpetuates the “having it all” debate—and its sexist assumptions. Second, I consider the escape routes out of this dominant discourse, analyzing how arguments maneuver beyond the stasis of fact to consider policy reforms regarding women in the workplace.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0253
  5. In Pursuit of Light War in Libya: Kairotic Justifications of War That Just Happened
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay examines President Barack Obama’s March 28, 2011 address on the war in Libya to theorize a shift in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which violence is insulated from critique through the numbing of public sensation. In contrast to traditional persuasive appeals aimed at securing collective participation and approval for war, Obama’s oratory is characteristic of “light war,” a mode of conflict that flows more freely by placing few demands on thought, feeling, and attention. I argue that Obama’s rhetoric limits the potential for audiences to sense the material consequences of war through a set of kairotic justifications in which violence is considered “just” in the dual sense that it just ended, and that it is just war, or merely a banal and quotidian version of conflict. After unpacking the anesthetizing features of Obama’s discourse, I conclude by addressing the prospects of resistance given the compressed interval for public thought and feeling to interrupt violent practices.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0195

May 2017

  1. Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece
    Abstract

    Aristotle's Organon provides an ingeniously systematic way to identify the discrete nature of disciplines that concern human thought and expression. While such an approach helps to understand the unique properties that warrant the recognition of disciplines as discrete, Aristotle's system of classification does not capture well the dynamics, synergy, and symbiotic relationships that appear when disciplines intersect. Perhaps, in fairness to Aristotle, his task was not to explore such relationships, but that does not mean that we should not try to better understand the nature and impact of disciplines such as rhetoric by examining their interplay within the dynamics of social interaction. It is this dynamism of disciplinary interaction that concerns Nathan Crick's Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Specifically, Crick's insightful work concentrates on how power (kratos) serves as the common denominator that grounds all disciplines of human thought and expression in classical Greece. Crick's perspective is shared by earlier scholars of rhetoric. For example, Jeffrey Walker's brilliant 2000 volume Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity helps us to understand that while disciplines may have discrete properties they are nonetheless inextricably bound together in the intersections of human symbolic action. That is, both mimetic and nonmimetic disciplines (e.g., poetry and rhetoric) work together in the social interplay of a culture's activities and, consequently, both their discrete (Aristotelian) properties and their relationship(s) with one another should be the object of study. The significance of Crick's Rhetoric and Power is revealed within the study of such relationships.Crick argues that rhetoric functioned as power in ancient Greece and that this phenomenon explains both the social contributions and the centrality of rhetoric in Hellenic culture. The quest, use, and abuse of power is a controlling force in classical Greece. “What is particularly notable about the Classical Greek inquiry into power,” Crick observes, “is that it always ended up placing power in relationship to speech” (3). From this perspective, the techne or “art” of rhetoric enables the manufacturing of power in human communication. Drawing on such modern thinkers as rhetoricians Kenneth Burke, Richard Weaver, and Chaïm Perelman, as well as philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Friedrich Nietzsche, Crick explains how this rhetorical capacity has resulting social consequences across all fields of human communication. In short, Crick's work suggests that rhetoric is the art for creating and performing social dramatism through “representative publicity” (242n26).Crick's orientation encourages us to reconceptualize rhetoric by moving away from Aristotelian notions of rhetoric as solely field-dependent casuistry and toward an idea of it as a phenomenon that encompasses all Hellenic disciplines during the classical period. To this end, Rhetoric and Power re-views such dominant aspects of ancient Greece as Homeric, Presocratic, tragic, Sophistic, Isocratean, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. Crick's thorough and systematic treatment of each of these vectors of Greek thought is framed by the relationship between rhetoric, power, and drama. “Rhetoric,” Crick argues, “therefore stands in relationship to power as a facilitator and medium,” and “any discussion of rhetoric must be grounded in a conception of power,” since it is rhetoric that functions as a medium for power through a spectrum of symbolic forms (6, 10). All major forms of art have the capacity to serve as media to perform power; this social dimension of art helps to dramatize the crises, struggles, and issues of the time, and it is through this dramatization that we can both understand and appreciate the scope of rhetoric's influence. For example, this view of rhetoric enables us to see how the Homeric rhapsode's dramatic narrative shaped the paideia of culture through an oral epic. We can see how Presocratic philosophers, dramatists, Sophists, and Plato shifted views of power, representing it as a human capacity rather than the province of gods. Crick also shows—and I believe these are the best points of the book—that the written forms of rhetoric taken on by the historian Thucydides and the educator Isocrates demonstrated a sort of literate power that not only facilitated abstract thought but moved the mentality of Greeks from an oral, tribal perspective to a panhellenic view, transforming the provincial outlook of the civic polis into the more catholic nationalism sought by Alexander. This view of power does not carry with it any inherently negative or cynical connotation. Power, exercised through dramatized rhetoric, can be used as a force for justice; such dramatizations can praise virtue and condemn vice and can provide didactic lessons from history that offer a moral standard and normative corrective.The strength of this volume is Crick's demonstration of how the development of Greek thought and culture is best understood through power. “This effort to transform the nature of power,” Crick observes, “by drawing on rational and mythic resources remains at the core of almost any successful rhetorical endeavor” (41). Homeric discourse served as the medium for maintaining and propagating long-held traditional values, but those values would be challenged. Presocratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, for example, would introduce the notion that mythic views should yield to the newly discovered power of logos (37). The birth of tragedy in the works of dramatists such as Aeschylus would reveal theater as a new medium of power, one where rhetoric literally took the stage to make social commentary, where the “tragic choice” was a rhetorical choice of values. Comedy, as discussed here with the work of Aristophanes, in turn took on an epideictic function; in the form of ridicule and satire, power served as a corrective force exposing (and critiquing) issues for Athenian viewers. Further, as democracy emerges in Athens it becomes apparent that “power will not come from a monarch who monopolizes the tools of violence and forces his subjects to hold their tongue and prostrate themselves before authority; power will come from the free speech of citizens standing on their own feet and deliberating over how to act in concert in pursuit of possibilities” (60).Crick believes that rhetoric finds its “habitation” in situations of struggle that dominate the drama of history, as evidence of these struggles are revealed in Sophistic rhetoric and its Platonic and Isocratean challenges. Crick does an excellent job of showing how Protagoras moved from a notion of logos to a two-logoi oppositional format, advancing the position that power (not merely validity) came through securing agreement between interlocutors by deliberating a continuum of possibilities (e.g., 68). “In effect,” Crick notes, “Protagoras was the first democratic public intellectual who offered citizens a practical metaphysics of political culture which gave them not only rights and responsibilities but also self-understanding rooted in a progressive attitude toward history” (65). This distribution of power explains the popularity and sustained success of the Sophistic movement, the embodiment of which was Gorgias, who awed Athenian spectators with his ability to dramatically perform power. Even in historiography, this vector between rhetor and power becomes evident. Thucydides narrates his history of the Peloponnesian War as a dramatic power struggle, making a conscious effort to apply the sophistic power of logoi (i.e., “set speeches”) to explain human motivation and celebrate human valor (103). Only recently have historians recognized that the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides are best understood in terms of the inherent rhetorical vector of historiography and that the notion of a dispassionate reported chronicling of events fails to capture what these and other historians of their time sought to accomplish by accounting for their moments of struggle. To rhetoricians, the idea that history is rhetorical is obvious, but this is a realization that came to scholars of Greek history only recently. Crick's insights to the ideological manifestations of rhetoric and power in historiography deserves praise (109, 112).Rhetoric and Power compels us to rethink and alter our views of the most important contributors to Greek rhetoric. Crick's treatment of Plato, for example, asks us to include the Protagoras along with our standard readings of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, if we wish to have a more complete understanding of Plato's view of the public intellectual. Crick shows that Plato comes to realize that rhetoric gives a power to philosophy, a power that provides a force of action for civic improvement. In a word, Plato's dramatization of the dialogue Protagoras makes apparent his view “that civic virtue can and must be taught” (154). What the Protagoras does is provide a plan of action that complements the inquiry into the nature and merits of (Sophistic) rhetoric in the Gorgias and the claim in the Phaedrus that rhetoric is at its best when supported by philosophy (162). I also consider this observation to be one of the best contributions of Crick's book.We can likewise appreciate the rhetoric of Isocrates through the lens of Crick's notion of power and drama. The contributions of Isocrates as a literate rhetorician are well established (179). What Crick helps us to realize is how Isocrates' concern for literacy shifted the power of rhetoric from an oral, local force to a more expansive generalized power that helped to foster and promote his campaign for panhellenism. “With the increase in the speed and ease of communication, both physically and through the written medium,” Crick observes, “Greece of the fourth century [BCE] was more and more becoming a political entity rather than a merely geographical one, and its increased scope and complexity required a medium of power, the written word, as well as a pattern of rhetorical address which could coordinate the affairs of multiple parties over a distance with detail and reliability” (183–84). Crick asks us to see the phenomenon of Isocrates (if we may call him that) as offering a form of power through a rhetoric that ushers “in the new age of representative publicity” (185). Isocrates' dream was to design a rhetoric that tribal city-states could share with a common political order and common leadership; in short, “a common Logos” (191).All that Crick does up to this point in Rhetoric and Power helps us to see rhetoric as a force in a new and important way. In this same spirit, we can now look at Aristotle's Rhetoric differently. The beginning passages of Aristotle's Rhetoric make it clear that Aristotle sees rhetoric as a source of power, even civic power. Yet Aristotle's treatment is not merely a study of an Athenian civic rhetoric of power but also an exploration of rhetoric that is intended to be generalized across city-states, a more universal accounting of rhetoric, rhetoric that is oral as well as written. As Crick observes: “In Aristotle's comprehensive vision, then, rhetoric becomes the means by which political power purifies itself through trial and error” (201). For Aristotle, Crick notes, rhetoric is a “civilizing power” that enables popular audiences to seek and attain a shared notion of aletheia (truth) that contributes to “the growth of civilization” through the deliberation of endoxa (reputable opinions) that are shared by everyone “or by the majority or by the wise” (201, 212). In short, as Crick argues, “truth, power and democracy” each serve the good of the other when rhetoric is employed in such a manner (213).It should be apparent that I consider Rhetoric and Power to be an excellent piece of scholarship, worthy of the accolades that I have given and that will doubtlessly follow from other historians of rhetoric. Are there any features that could have made this excellent work even better? There are only a few, and these are not offered as a corrective but rather as a complement to the contributions of this work. The treatment of Thucydides could have been expanded to include other historians in more detail. Herodotus, for example, is recognized as the first Greek historian because he explained how the Athenians came to defeat the Persians. More than merely chronicling events, he claimed that the Athenians had discovered the power of the collective force of democracy over the inherent flaws of Persian tyranny. I also believe that a more extended discussion of how epideictic rhetoric manifests power—especially in the treatment of Greek comedy—would have been beneficial. Finally, I believe that an extended treatment of William M. A. Grimaldi's brilliant commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric would have provided a richer understanding of Aristotle's view of rhetoric's dunamis and energia than offered in this otherwise insightful analysis of Aristotelian rhetoric.Crick concludes Rhetoric and Power by stating that “rhetoric as a conscious art of constituting, transforming, challenging, and channeling power came into being within the drama of Classical Greece during the height of the tragic age, and it is only within a dramatic retelling that we can capture its spirit” (225). Crick shows that both in classical Greece and even today rhetoric has the capacity to serve as “a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226). Rhetoricians such as Crick and myself hold onto the hope that the power of rhetoric will be used in this manner. What makes Crick's hope substantial is that his work does not buoy it up with empty platitudes but rather demonstrates through careful and insightful scholarship what happens when it is realized.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.50.2.0233
  2. Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ
    Abstract

    ABSTRACT The first emperor of Rome, Augustus, exploited architecture to convey his sophisticated propaganda. He famously boasted to have found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble. This claim has been considered an apt metaphor for the establishment of an imperial state, though the quantitative, physical veracity of the boast has never been fully interrogated. A team from UCLA mapped and modeled the marble projects added to Rome in the decades of Augustan power, using rule-based procedural modeling to generate numerous 3D, interactive, geo-temporal simulations of the entire cityscape with each marble intervention placed in situ topographically and chronologically. Broad, pan-urban views of the city’s evolution revealed that Augustan marble projects were neither overwhelming in number nor readily visible. Examination of the urban experience over time and space, however, revealed that marble construction had a constant and pervasive impact. Daily urban residents found their movements blocked by marble transports and their senses bombarded by the noisy, dusty work at construction sites. Thus, it was not the rhetoric conveyed by architecture that justified Augustus’ claim, but the rhetoric of the building act that spoke loudly and persuasively in situ.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1326325
  3. Kant’s Philosophy of Communication
    Abstract

    Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2017.1325666

April 2017

  1. Sarojini Naidu—The Forgotten Orator of India
    Abstract

    Sarojini Naidu’s platform rhetoric suggests that she functioned as the representative for Indian women due to her presence in the public sphere as first a poet, and then a nationalist leader. Naidu used her role as a jingoistic orator to persuade her audiences to believe that female equality was a necessary precursor to the independence of India. In her speeches, she reasoned with her listeners using the ancient Indian method of Nyaya and other various rhetorical techniques to strengthen her arguments.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1282223
  2. Exploding Rhetorics of 9/11
    Abstract

    This essay discusses the affordances of using an affect-based approach to 9/11 discourses that facilitates teaching civic engagement. Representations and rhetoric about 9/11 are found in a range of modes—film, documentary, literature, news coverage, and official government documents. Asking students to analyze these representations using a variety of rhetorical strategies highlights the way that various sources of (competing) knowledge about the national tragedy disrupt the notion that there is an accepted, uniform way of understanding this event. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates how varied sources of meaning making construct our public sphere.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-3770101
  3. Evolving Identities: A Case Study of a Writing Center Collaboration with a Public Speaking Course
  4. When Actions Collide: Motive Constructions Spanning Different Acts
    Abstract

    While Burke examined the relationships among the terms of the pentad within a single pentadic set (i.e., a single "act"), a few rhetorical critics using pentadic criticism have noted grammatical relationships that cross between pentadic sets (multiple acts). Yet no one has theorized about those multipentadic relationships. This paper provides a basic explanation of how such multipentadic relationships work in strategic constructions, using many illustrations from public discourse.

  5. When Actions Collide: Motive Constructions Spanning Different Acts
    Abstract

    While Burke examined the relationships among the terms of the pentad within a single pentadic set (i.e., a single "act"), a few rhetorical critics using pentadic criticism have noted grammatical relationships that cross between pentadic sets (multiple acts). Yet no one has theorized about those multipentadic relationships. This paper provides a basic explanation of how such multipentadic relationships work in strategic constructions, using many illustrations from public discourse.

March 2017

  1. Lion’s Last Roar, Eagle’s First Flight: Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956
    Abstract

    Abstract The Suez Crisis address, given in response to the exigencies of the Cold War, marked a dramatic shift in presidential rhetoric regarding the Middle East. In this essay I build upon Richard Gregg’s analysis of this speech by demonstrating how President Dwight Eisenhower’s rhetoric broke from previously articulated rationales for American engagement with the region and subtly proposed a new understanding of U.S. responsibility for the region that has yet to be refuted. This speech should be understood as establishing premises in presidential discourse that have been used to mobilize support for American intervention in the Middle East from the Eisenhower Doctrine to the present.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.1.0033

February 2017

  1. In Memoriam: Lloyd Bitzer (1931–2016)
    Abstract

    Lloyd Bitzer's passing came as deeply sad news. He was an exceptional person in all respects. I was fortunate to have been his student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and to have experienced Lloyd in my life as a mentor, a colleague in the discipline, a confidant, a friend, and a role model. The discipline of rhetoric was fortunate to have had him among its ranks as a leading theorist. He was among those most responsible for pushing rhetorical studies into new territory during the latter part of the twentieth century. Lloyd was the principle investigator on and driving force behind the National Developmental Project on Rhetoric, which involved forty scholars from philosophy, rhetoric, communication, English, and sociology at the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences at the beginning of the 1970s and which culminated in The Prospect of Rhetoric, the volume he coedited with his colleague Edwin Black. And Philosophy and Rhetoric was fortunate to have him grace its pages with his scholarship and editorial advice. His iconic essay “The Rhetorical Situation” inaugurated the journal in 1968 as the lead article. It set the stage for reconsidering rhetoric in terms of its philosophical commitments.Lloyd was not a prolific publisher, but each of his articles were gems of careful scholarship and tight reasoning, and they demonstrate an unfailing sense for ideas that matter and an understanding of the impact those ideas could have on future work. His 1959 Quarterly Journal of Speech article “Aristotle's Enthymeme Revisited” broke new ground by decoupling the form of pisteis Aristotle regarded as the heart of persuasion from its logical form. His 1960 QJS article “A Re-evaluation Campbell's Doctrine of Evidence” argued that Campbell, in following Hume, had inverted the two-millennial-old Western tradition that established reason as the capital of right action and instead located it in the passions. His subsequent editor's introduction to the edited republication of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric and his 1969 Philosophy and Rhetoric article “Hume's Philosophy in George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric” meticulously made the case for Hume's role in introducing rhetoric into the new country wherein its study led to understanding human nature. In 1978, when consideration of the public sphere was just beginning to emerge as a scholarly topic in the literature on rhetoric, Lloyd published his award- winning essay “Rhetoric and Public Knowledge,” in which he considered the necessary conditions for distinguishing between audiences and publics. It was not a coincidence that two years earlier he broke form with the practice of association presidents in the then Speech Communication Association of offering as their presidential address reflections on the discipline when he presented a version of this paper as his presidential address. His choice was an expression of his belief that presidents of scholarly societies should lead by example of their scholarship.Lloyd's presidential address, as much as anything, captured his sense of himself as a scholar and teacher and spoke to what he considered the nobility of his and our work. Studying with him was at once exhilarating, fearsome, calming, and affirming. He was demanding of his students, excited by ideas, not given to tolerating sloppy thinking or unsupported argument, quick to affirm student insights and progress, able to express and inspire confidence in his students' work, and generous with his time and counsel, always willing to assist his students' growth and prosperity. My friend Tom Farrell, another of Lloyd's doctoral students, captured well how lasting an impact our mentor had when, in the prime of our careers, he commented “I still write for Lloyd.” So did I; so do I still.In May 2015, the Rhetoric Society of America held its biennial summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I was filled with anticipation for the event, which is unique in its format and impact on its participants, for being once more in Madison where I had done my doctoral studies, and for the opportunity to spend time with colleagues, former students, and dear friends in the discipline. At the center of my excitement was the dinner date Lloyd and I had arranged. That evening was vintage Lloyd: he and his incomparable spouse Jo Ann arriving precisely on time, dinner at a favorite restaurant, lively and wide-ranging conversation covering shop talk, politics, the university, mutual friends, our children, and grandchildren. Too soon the evening ended, but Lloyd insisted that we should drive to his home outside Madison to drop off Jo Ann and have a nightcap before he took me back to my hotel on campus. He made certain we extended the evening so our conversation might continue. His characteristic care for how our time was spent conveyed more than words the intimacy of personal regard.Lloyd was not comfortable with warm expressions (he edited my dissertation acknowledgment of him, insisting I delete comments on what he meant to me—he meant the world—as something I might find embarrassing for their warmth in later years). But he knew how to convey his warmth and how to acknowledge it in return. He brought me to believe in myself as a young scholar, he filled me with admiration and trust, he inspired delight in intellectual work, and more than anyone he awakened my sense of its essential dignity. He touched the profession and this journal as a scholar. He touched me as a person. I shall remember Lloyd always with affection and gratitude. He enriched my life and I shall miss him dearly.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.50.1.00vi
  2. Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner
    Abstract

    Scientific research demonstrates that monosodium glutamate (MSG) is neither solely found in Chinese food nor a cause for health panics. Nonetheless, such a narrative still persists in the public sphere. I conduct a rhetorical analysis of the original debate on MSG to illuminate how the process of genre uptake – the process of information selection and translation from medical discussion to popular news – facilitated this prejudiced understanding. In the original debate about MSG’s effects, doctors trivialized this issue via satire that was based on latent stereotypes of Chinese identity. Although performed as insider humor, these responses were sufficiently aligned to genre expectations so as to appear to outside readers as unquestionable medical fact. As this knowledge was taken up and disseminated in the public sphere, the markers of humor disappeared, but the prejudicial views remained. This case demonstrates how the process of genre uptake can perpetuate prejudiced ideological narratives even in the absence of overt discrimination.

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1253
  3. Antiguos y modernos en la obra retórica y oratoria de Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594): tonitrua cum fulgure
    Abstract

    In this paper we attempt to identify the traces of the past in the rhetorical writings and sermons by Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594), probably the most popular Italian preacher in the Cinquecento. Our aim is to highlight some aspects of his rhetorical background, trying to show that he draws not only on Classical and Christian models but also on contemporary ones. In fact, as we shall make clear, Panigarola's theoretical principles and his own preaching are the result of the harmonization of Classical and Christian models with the new demands of ecclesiastical rhetoric and oratory in the Counter Reformation period.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.24
  4. Demagogic Style and Historical Method: Locating Cleon's Mytilenean Rhetoric (Thucydides 3.37–40)
    Abstract

    Truth-construction and -mediation are theorized both by Thucydides xyngrapheus and by the internal rhetores in his History, with tensions between these perspectives highlighting rhetorically significant moments of political communication. The historian posits the (negative) configuration “contest – pleasure – hearing – untruth – useless” as contrastive foil to his own model of “rigorous enquiry – pleasure disavowed – seeing – truth – useful.” Cleon the demagogue, in a process of rhetorical “contaminatio” or creative fusion, artfully (mis)appropriates and instrumentalizes this model in his critique of Athenian assembly culture, embedding the signature Thucydidean categories in a spirited anti-Thucydidean argument. His distinctive approach, conflating Thucydidean categories and noteworthy Periclean echoes, marks him as both anti-Pericles and anti-Thucydides, and signals a counter-model to the historian's own schema of truth-construction. As such, Cleon's tirade fits into the History's wider concern with the corruption of political discourse over the course of the war.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.1

January 2017

  1. Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn
    Abstract

    This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1238105

2017

  1. Using Genre to Bridge Research, Professional Writing, and Public Writing at University of North Dakota: A Program Profile
    Abstract

    To illustrate how genre pedagogy and public writing pedagogy can inform one another, this program profile describes the second-semester composition course at University of North Dakota, ENGL 130: College Composition II: Writing for Public Audiences. In this course, genre works as a rhetorical bridge across an interlinked sequence of research, professional, and public writing assignments focused on a contemporary topic of public interest. The course maintains a public orientation throughout: as a simulated genre system, the course constitutes a protopublic, or a rhetorical space in which students can learn about public debates, rehearse public discourses, and prepare for future performances of public genres with rhetorical awareness in their repertoire.

  2. Writing Against Harassment: Public Writing Pedagogy and Online Hate
    Abstract

    Of the 40% of internet users who have faced harassment online, young adults, women, and racial minorities are especially vulnerable, experiencing more severe harassment and experiencing it more often. This article attempts to reconcile the increasingly urgent calls for students to compose in public spaces online with the reality of potential harassment. Compositionists should avoid relying on a Habermasian understanding of the public sphere and instead embrace a political, ecological approach to public writing that recognizes publics as the result of the interactions between multiple texts and actors, and that attends to the ways in which power relations alternately shape, constrain, and enable those texts and actors. This model equips students with a more sophisticated framework for understanding internet publics, and will ultimately empower them to make informed rhetorical choices about which public networks to enter, ensuring not just more effective rhetorical action but safer online experiences.