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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by: The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk by Samuel McCormick Daniel M. Gross (bio) Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-67763-7. Implicitly McCormick's book addresses a question that is urgent in the US academic context, where current rhetoric and communication practices are in fact much studied: Why study history at all? At best, so the skeptic might offer, historical work provides some interesting background to the pressing problems of today. At worst, historical work exacerbates some of those same problems around rhetorical power by simply by spending too much time on received traditions. (I've long admired Malea Powell's sly and self-consuming conference paper title "Aristotle Is Not My Father.") At the same time a set of distinct answers to this history question has been brewing at The University of Chicago Press, thanks in large part to the late editor extraordinaire Douglas Mitchell, who had himself learned about rhetoric from the late century Chicago scene, and Richard McKeon in particular. The series Mitchell started at Chicago "Rhetoric and Communication" has published different types of concept-oriented histories by scholars including Nancy Struever, John Durham Peters, Debra Hawhee, David Marshall, and now Samuel McCormick. Taken together, this group of scholars shows how rhetoric and communication can't be studied adequately without some strong historical version of conceptual work, because that is how the very [End Page 90] things we wish to study appear as such in the first place. In what follows I discuss how McCormick's book makes the case elegantly. First of all, why for McCormick "conceptual history," especially as it would apply to "everyday talk" counterintuitively? Shouldn't we study everyday talk by recording and coding ordinary speakers in face-to-face settings? No doubt, replies McCormick, such grounded study of the first type gets at something sociological (2). But how can we study the very concept of everyday talk as it has shifted significantly online for instance, showing up as "chat," which can't be the same thing? For that sort of study, historical work on the concept is essential, because that is the only way we know what our object of study is in the first place. It is not "conversation," which McCormick calls an interpersonal modality, that achieved its highest art and greatest conceptual clarity in the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is not public sphere discourse legitimated by (again Enlightenment) institutions of oratory and journalism (291). Instead, McCormick argues with a nod to paradox, "everyday talk" is a distinct concept that rises with modernity and its industrializing momentum (4), what Kierkegaard first identifies as snak. This is where McCormick must demonstrate—and he does so beautifully—why we turn to Kierkegaard at this point of inquiry, and not only to his rich archive of wagging tongues, noise and nonsense, cliché and bombast, wordplay and witticism, tangent, reprise, gossip, gimcrack, diversion, duplicity, tedious anecdote, absurd abstraction, abrupt interjection, and endless logorrhea (44). Methodologically, McCormick's powerful point is that snak is the concept that names this verbal efflorescence, and Kierkegaard's work is where the concept appears in its sharpest and critical form. If we studied for instance only Gert Westephaler's fictional talk, or the philosophical talk of Hegel's Danish parrots (44), we would lose track of the concept snak altogether, and thus we would not really understand what we were talking about ourselves: an irony that McCormick has to dance with throughout this substantial section steeped in Kierkegaard's first language Danish, and in his vast corpus that we no longer know how to handle academically. One outstanding virtue of McCormick's book is that it will teach a new generation of scholars what Kierkegaard did besides anticipate existentialism. The next section of the book, a book that runs 326 pages in total, picks up the work of Martin Heidegger, who was himself a keen reader of Kierkegaard. Now focusing on the 1920s, which were for Heidegger both a period of tremendous intellectual ferment that includes his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric and...

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates’ scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students’ writing needs in tertiary settings.

Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) is a growing field of study that provides for holistic understandings of written texts, spoken discourse, rhetorical strategies, and the people who use them. Organized as a discussion of the topics, methods, and their potential applications for writing center research, this essay reviews three edited collections, Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review by Charlotte Taylor and Anne Marchi (Routledge, 2018); The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis by Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy (Routledge, 2020); and Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis by Camilla Vásquez (Bloomsbury, 2022). Each introduces a range of practices, insights, and concerns for combining corpus and discourse analysis, which can be useful for developing writing center research, consultant training, and administrative outcomes.

“Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond” blends narrative, mixed methods research, and rhetorical analysis to make a case for the possibilities inherent in homegrown wellness practices that are “communal, political, and rooted in defiance of white supremacy.”

Other| December 30 2022 BOOKS OF INTEREST Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy Department of English Language and Literature University of South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2022) 55 (4): 424–430. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.4.0424 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Curated and edited by Michael Kennedy; BOOKS OF INTEREST. Philosophy & Rhetoric 30 December 2022; 55 (4): 424–430. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.55.4.0424 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2023The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This is a book review of Creating Digital Literacy Spaces for Multilingual Writers by Meghan Bowling-Johnson.

This is a book review of What is Good Academic Writing? Insights into Discipline-Specific Student Writing by Michèle le Roux.

Written prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Heidi Yoston Lawrence introduces her monograph, Vaccine Rhetorics, with a . . . candid and vulnerable personal story about refusing the rotavirus vaccine booster for her son. She then goes on to make an astoundingly prescient claim: “Even the most ardent supporter of vaccination might one day be faced with a new requirement that comes with a new risk that might demand a reconsideration of support” (xiv).

Flores’ key contribution to the field is to highlight the constitutive force of this figuration in sustaining racial national projects. She argues that the narratives characterizing Mexican migrants as temporary and cheap labor have constituted Mexicans as deportable, disposable, and racialized as illegal.

This review considers Ellen C. Carillo's The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading, an important contribution that examines labor-based grading contracts through a disability studies lens.

This book provides a compilation of scholarly chapters that focus on the various components of technical and professional communication (TPC) that, together, give it a distinct identity, and that must be sustainable. Reflection and upkeep of TPC components maintain the longevity of its identity. By critically analyzing what these fragments signify collectively as an identity, it is possible to develop a perspective that is durable for visualizing the TPC identity. Some of the TPC components included in this work are genres, ethics, procedural knowledge, procedural discourse, sociotechnical contexts, applied rhetoric, and participatory action research. The book’s 10 chapters are divided into three sections, each of which is underpinned by a strong research technique, strong theoretical foundation, and the authors’ real-world experiences. This book may be helpful to academics, industry professionals, and students alike. It provides professionals with a novel viewpoint on several TPC facets across various application fields, such as biomedical writing. This book offers a deep understanding of TPC and focuses on several intriguing subjects, such as intercultural and transnational dimensions, and accessibility and disability. One of the strengths of the book is the abundance of real-world examples and research studies with trustworthy research protocols spread throughout several chapters. This book is undoubtedly a great resource for learning about the subject, its trends, and new problems that may arise in the future.

The authors of the book present a broad survey of technologies and applications of AI as they particularly impact technical and professional communications. This book presents a broad treatment of its subjects, particularly given the framework of social implications, necessary literacy, and civic engagement that the authors use to explore the three facets of writing futures: collaboration, algorithms, and autonomous agents. The work is a survey of many technologies, applications, and developments, any of which may or may not play a substantial future role in the future of writing. Some of the authors’ examples may seem tangential to the TPC profession, but one cannot always predict future effects. The authors situate the book as “positioning scholars, instructors, and practitioners to plan for rapidly evolving technological and social contexts.” With its broad coverage of emerging technologies, rich citations, and wealth of backing resources, Writing Futures provides a launching point for deeper, focused study in the myriad areas of collaborative technologies, autonomous agents, and AI as they profoundly impact the TPC profession and the human experience.

The book offers a range of plans including a 32-week plan to craft chapter-length literature reviews for a dissertation, a 16-week plan for those more time-crunched or experienced, an 8-week plan for the “highly motivated” or those with shorter literature review requirements such as for a conference paper, and finally two-week and one-week plans for the truly desperate. Activities in each chapter take the writer step-by-step through the process of preparing the review for evaluation by an advisor. The book is further divided into 12 chapters, the last of which is geared more toward advisors and writing instructors. This book fills a long-standing gap in resources for novice research writers. Too often, graduate students receive feedback on only grammar and punctuation issues—surface concerns—rather than the structure and clarity of their narratives. Berdanier and Lenart provide a step-by-step guide for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and new graduate advisors in writing effective, impactful literature reviews, the backbone of journal articles that get cited and grant proposals that get funded. Not to be overlooked, though, are writing center coaches, who often see engineering students and faculty in their sessions but may not have the background to feel comfortable providing guidance on such projects. At a minimum, this book is a must-have for engineering graduate students seeking a path through one of the more challenging writing tasks early in their careers.

In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Jane Bennett encourages her readers to slow down the internal thoughts of human superiority over "intrinsically inanimate matter" --- thoughts that prevent them from "detecting...a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies" and their political systems (p. ix). Some readers of CDQ may wonder why a book from 2010 is worth our attention in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on women's reproductive autonomy, and the restrictions placed on the EPA's control over carbon emissions all suggest a clear resurgence of what Bennett calls the oft-repeated "vitalism-materialism debate" (p. 90)---the debate over how far affect, agency, animacy, and vitality extend. Bennett resolves the tensions of that debate by fusing traditional ideas of mechanistic materialism with the notions of an unknowable agency in all matter (not just humans), an agency that lacks representation in current political thought. If technical communicators and designers dedicated to crisis/risk communication as well as those studying and producing political technologies (Cheek, 2021, 2022) didn't see the application of Bennett's "vital materialism" at the end of the Bush era's heated debates over stem cell research and the war in Iraq as well as the North American power blackout of 2003, then perhaps, given the current political climate, I can persuade them to find merit in revisiting Bennett's arguments.

Beyond the Makerspace: Making and Relational Rhetorics (2021) provides an engaging study of contributions makerspaces provide (both within and outside the making movement) to meaning making through the lens of rhetoric and storytelling. Shivers-McNair situates herself as both a storyteller and an amateur maker in the makerspace she studies and considers applications from these stories for instruction and making knowledge. Situating rhetoric within makerspaces allows Shivers-McNair to create a broad understanding of the relational rhetorics that are "both more than symbolic and more than human" (p. 11). Questioning and evaluating the boundaries between individuals within these spaces allows Shivers-McNair to evaluate conceptualizing meaning making beyond the making movement, an important trend towards reconceptualizing making as an embodied and relational practice that extends to different contexts in society (Gollihue, 2019). Through six chapters, Shivers-McNair provides a concise look into how meaning can be embodied by the individuals of the SoDo Makerspace and how considerations towards making as a relational rhetorical act can extend beyond the scope of one specific makerspace. Readers are invited to consider making as a boundary-marking practice that can speak to the larger nature of how we understand meaning beyond words.

In Dislike-Minded , Jonathan Gray makes a fascinating case for why the idea of dislike, away from disgust, anger, or hatred is worthy of its own lane of study. Pointing out that ratings, algorithms, collection data, and even academia prioritizes positive attributes like likes , Gray suggests that we in fact do a disservice to our understanding of choice (what it is, who it's for, and why) by excluding ideas that represent dislike. As an extension of taste, he points out that our connection of dislike to negative opinions like hate or aversion are misdirected as a group opinion instead of an individual idea. Further, the book suggests that this view reduces dislike's complex emotional engagement---comprised of a number of factors that include things like disappointment or expectation, the inescapable nature of the work, or the critical reception of a text or its handling of specific ideas---down to a simplistic dismissal or nonchalance. Instead, Gray posits that dislike works as a focused narrow consideration that often requires a deep connection to either the subject, or the subject field. However, it is often thought of based off a grouping of generalized characteristics akin to assumptions or stereotypes, as opposed to its actual singular positionality, where dislike straddles the complicated line between scrutiny and dissatisfaction.

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he first class I ever took as an undergrad with Dr. Mara Holt was titled "Women's Rhetorics. " I barely knew what rhetorics were (testing out of first-year composition via the AP exam was a mixed blessing for someone who became an English major), and I certainly didn't know what the word "pedagogy" meant. The first readings in Dr. Holt's course-Nancy Schniedewind's "Teaching Feminist Process" and Carolyn Shrewsbury's "What Is Feminist Pedagogy"-left me a little blindsided. Not only did both address concepts that felt above my understanding, but what I could make out focused on teachingsomething that seemed, from my inadequate understanding, as distinct from the focus of the class. (The teacher might be interested in articles like these, I thought, but why would the students be?) This reaction is the almost textbook response of a student who had, until then, been inculcated in the traditional power dynamics of a teacher-focused educational system. Only gradually would I come to understand how different, and important, it was that Dr. Holt was making clear her own pedagogical influences and opening these up for discussion.

Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Jason Maxwell Jason Maxwell University at Buffalo, SUNY Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 415–417. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jason Maxwell; Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 415–417. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 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/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín Javier Espino Martín. De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada. Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Clásicos 62. Ciudad de México, MX: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN 978-607-30-2747-2 Genaro Valencia Constantino Genaro Valencia Constantino Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 412–415. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Genaro Valencia Constantino; Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 412–415. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 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/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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The impact of written communication in ancient Athens, particularly the social consequences of literacy on an oral culture, has been a subject of keen interest among rhetoricians. This essay synthesizes current research on the impact of literacy in ancient Athens from a rhetorical vector. One of the principal observations discussed in this review of current research is that the alphabetic writing of oral discourse better enabled rhetors to invent and compose complex modes of oral argument and persuasion than the heuristics of orality alone.

The book Spelling and Writing Words: Theoretical and Methodological Advances, edited by Cyril Perret and Thierry Olive (2019), is an insightful and thorough state-of-the art of the research on written word production and spelling. The works included in this volume are based on the premise that investigating cognitive processes extends our understanding of lexical writing skill. For this purpose, the editors have brought together various researchers that explore many aspects of written word production, so as to provide the reader with updated and in-depth insights on this topic.

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Writing is a collection of research papers edited by Rosa M. Manchón and Charlene Polio. They aim to create a compendium that serves to contextualize and synthesize the development and research practices of the connection between second language (L2) writing and second language acquisition (SLA). The chapters of the collection feature theoretical perspectives and current empirical development on how and why L2 writing can be a meaningful site for language learning. Three reasons are formulated to articulate the significance of the volume concerning SLA-informed L2 writing studies: (1) research outcomes in this research domain are theoretically and empirically fruitful; (2) the theoretical contributions to the SLA knowledge are newly achieved; (3) L2 writing plays an indispensable role in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) settings. By taking into account the socially situated nature of L2 writing teaching and learning, Manchón and Cerezo (2018) highlighted the substantial value of integrating L2 writing with SLA theories and research for both boosting the L2 learning process and advancing present and prospective SLA research agendas. Such an academic viewpoint appears to be predominant and invaluable in this collection with its theoretical advancements and practical insights contributed by authors from diverse educational settings.