It is a disciplinary commonplace to identify Plato as the enemy of rhetoric. While it is also common to suggest a more complex role for Plato and his dialogues in contemporary rhetorical studies, this is often treated as a revision of his traditional role. In this article, I question the historicity of the narrative that Plato is the historical enemy of rhetoric. I investigate the role that Plato played in the rhetorical tradition from Demosthenes to Du Bois and compare it to how he is framed in the contemporary discipline - first, in disciplinary histories and second, in contemporary theory. What I find is a distinct disconnect between his traditional treatment and the contemporary construction of his place in the tradition.

Reviews 427 Davida H. Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2017. xii + 156 pp. ISBN: 9781909697805. The tension within rhetorical criticism of the Bible, whether the Hebrew Bible or New Testament in Greek, is how to think of and hence to utilize the Greek and Latin rhetorical traditions. That is, do they consti­ tute the metalanguage for rhetorical criticism or are they exemplified instan­ ces of how the ancients approached rhetoric? In this volume, Charney for the most part attempts to find a middle ground, what she calls "compara­ tive rhetoric" (p. 12). By this she means that, even though she draws heavily upon ancient rhetoric, she does not believe that the ancient Hebrews knew or drew upon Greco-Roman rhetoric. Nevertheless, many of the categories of ancient rhetoric—such as the genres and some of the stylistic techniques, such as stasis theory—are central to the argument that she makes, while she also draws on some of the techniques of the New Rhetoric, such as "amplitude" (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca) or "amplification" (Burke) and "association" or "identification." She utilizes these helpful categories, pla­ ced in the service of a close reading of selected first-person psalms, to offer rhetorical explications of their persuasive power. Charney is not concerned with the many historical factors that tend to mire much psalm scholarship, but she posits a rhetorical situation appropriate to each psalm and is atten­ tive to each text's rhetorical features. The contents of this relatively short volume include, first, an introduc­ tion that lays out Chamey's view of the psalms as argumentative discourse within Israelite public life, her definition of rhetoric in relationship to literary analysis, and, most importantly, her definition of rhetoric that draws upon both ancient and contemporary theory—all in service of her reading of the psalms as instances of ancient rhetoric, attempts by the first-person speaker to persuade God through various authorial stances. The rest of the chapters comprise various examples of how rhetoric is exemplified by individual psalms. Chapter 1 concerns praise of God as a form of currency used to per­ suade God, what she labels a form of epideictic discourse. She here treats Psalms 71,16, 26, and 131. Chapter 2 focuses upon the few psalms addressed to the speaker's opponents, drawing upon notions of amplitude and amplifi­ cation to establish the focus of each psalm. The psalms here are 4, 62, and 82. Chapter 3 treats psalmic lament as a form of deliberative rhetoric, with an established psalmic form that functions as a "policy argument (pp. 56-58). Charney discusses the lament Psalms 54 and 13 in relation to their lack of amplification, proposing that the speaker was confident in his innocence before God. She usefully draws upon the conversational implicatures of Paul Grice especially regarding the maxim of quantity. In contrast to chapter 3, chapter 4 focuses on psalms in which the speaker argues, sometimes at length (amplitude), for his innocence and attempts to persuade God to act on his behalf, as in Psalms 4, 22, and 17. Chapter 5 concentrates upon psalms in which the speaker draws strong opposition between himself and his oppo­ nents as he seeks vindication from them based upon the fairness of God. 428 RHETORICA The psalms treated here are 7, 35, and 109. Chapter 6 encompasses the few psalms in which the speaker admits to his guilt, with treatment of Psalms 130, 38, and 51. Finally, chapter 7 discusses psalms in which the speaker is involved in persuading himself rather than simply expressing his opinion regarding God or his opponents. Treated here are Psalms 77 and 73. The vol­ ume concludes with a bibliography and helpful indexes, including one on rhetorical terms. There are a few problems with this volume that cannot be overlooked. These include Charney's sometimes appearing to rely too heavily upon the categories of the Greeks and the Romans. These might restrict her categories in some instances where modern interpretation has expanded the resources regarding language function. The categorization of lament as deliberative seems to be forced by her attempt to equate the ancient categories with the biblical...

Reviews Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 In the opening line of Tasteful Domesticity, Sarah Walden notes, "Taste is an elusive concept" (p. 1). It refers to both a physical sense and a theoret­ ical concept, an individual preference and a cultural standard. Taste was also central to the empiricist philosophies and belletristic rhetorics that informed nineteenth-century American rhetorical theory. Although such theoretical discussions of taste were the province of men, Walden argues that American women in the late eighteenth through early twentieth centu­ ries engaged publicly in discourses of taste in their cookbooks. Walden reveals an evolution of taste discourse through the long nine­ teenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the era with which Walden's research begins, taste discourse contributed to the proj­ ect of nation building (p. 28). Engaging in this discourse, women cookbook authors in the early republic emphasized what they represented as distinctly American virtues such as independence and frugality. Moving into the mid­ nineteenth century, discourses of taste would continue to emphasize virtue while they were further linked to Christian morality and sentimental rhetoric (p. 53). Victorian-era domestic experts emphasized and performed the role of the "true woman" in teaching and maintaining the tastes and morals of the home—and, by extension, the nation. With the rise of Progressivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prescriptions of taste would be grounded in scientific standards, and progressive-era women participating in cooking school and home economics movements sought to professionalize women's domestic work by aligning it with science. This narrative of an evolving discourse of taste, however, is not the central focus of Walden's argument. Although Tasteful Domesticity certainly offers a macrohistory of over a century of women's domestic writing, Walden's analysis reveals domestic writing as a complex and multivalent rhetorical practice that resists easy narratives. For example, readers may be surprised by Walden's inclusion of the southern antebellum cookbook The Virginia Housewife in Chapter 1: "Taste and Virtue: Domestic Citizenship and the New Republic." Unlike the other cookbook authors discussed in this chapter, Virginia Housewife author Mary Randolph refers to taste only as a sensory perception and not as a cultural standard. Walden argues that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 4, pp. 422-437. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 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. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.374.422 Reviews 423 this was common in southern antebellum cookbooks (pp. 48-49). Thus, the Virginia Housewife may seem to fit better in Chapter 3: "Taste and Region: The Constitutive Function of Southern Cookbooks," where Walden examines other antebellum southern cookbooks. However, by including Randolph's text in Chapter 1, Walden complicates her argument about early nine­ teenth-century female cookbook writers' engagement in taste discourse as a nation-building rhetorical activity. In antebellum southern cookbooks (and like the republican mother associated with northern states), the southern woman played a role in the civic progress of the region through her manage­ ment of the home (p. 49). However, in the antebellum south, management of the home also included management of slave labor. Thus, Walden concludes that Randolph's Virginia Housewife "requires one to face the difficult truth that while discourses of taste serve republican virtue, they also govern those disenfranchised by its practice" (p. 52). The inclusion of Randolph's text in Chapter 1 reveals the complicated issues of identity and power lurking within discourses of taste. Throughout her analysis, Walden examines the ways women's cookbooks contributed to ideologies of nationality, class, race, region, and gender. For example, dur­ ing the Victorian era, women's participation in taste discourse reified a gen­ der ideology that implicitly defined "true woman" as white and middle class, and these demarcations of gender, race, and class would persist throughout the nineteenth century. During the...

AbstractIn this essay, I offer a reception study of the varied responses to and interpretations of a burning church in the town of Eldoret following the 2007 Kenya presidential election. Specifically, I study responses from the U.S. and British media, U.S. officials, and Kenyan politicians. My analysis illuminates how different uses of the term “genocide” mobilize particular sensibilities about the relation between ethnicity and politics and demonstrates how the label of genocide constrains interpretations of violence. In the media and discourse of U.S. politicians, the identification or denial of genocide was made by setting ethnicity and politics as opposing explanatory factors of the violence. Discourses in Kenya, however, demonstrate that understanding the violence required understanding the intersection and permeability of these same categories. This analysis has important implications for understanding how conflicts are and are not named genocide. It demonstrates the importance of attending to the nuanced rhetoric of genocide and calls our attention to the contingent relationships among ethnicity, politics, and genocide.

Energy Darwinism is a metaphor used in economic discourse that proposes markets will naturally become greener and cleaner as fossil fuel costs increase. Influenced by Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, I perform a close reading of the metaphor to analyze its presence in two Citigroup reports. Based on this reading, I argue that the Energy Darwinism metaphor anthropomorphizes markets as acting subjects whose economic autonomy should not be violated and supports the cleansing of industry’s environmental sins. These features of Energy Darwinism construct what I call neoliberal piety, which frames environmental restoration not as inherently valuable but as a by-product of economic success and technological progress. The Energy Darwinism metaphor provides an important case study for analyzing contemporary energy discourse, the rhetorical obstacles that prevent imagining sustainable futures, and the ways we might rework neoliberal assumptions in service of those sustainable futures.

This essay analyzes Decision Points, an interactive exhibit at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and illustrates how it leverages the digital properties of videogames to make an argument for the necessity of the Bush Doctrine. Starting with how the museum’s material and spatial environment builds identification between visitors and Bush, the piece proceeds to show how the exhibit relies on the affordances of digital environments to characterize Bush’s decision-making process as complex. Focusing on the exhibit’s simulation of the War in Iraq, I argue that rhetorical studies will need to account for the persuasive capacities of videogames in memory places in order to help visitors become more aware of and responsive to the rhetorical claims they encode. This necessity opens possibility spaces for collaboration between the fields of rhetoric, museology, and game studies.

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show that Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.

Hugh Blair’s rhetorical theory reflects the tenets of New Science, answering the call for communication as the transfer of knowledge from the composer to the audience. Reading Blair on style through the Enlightenment cognitive model of physiological psychology suggests a mutual cognitive associative model. In this model, style is essential, not ornamental, as it limits dissonance in the audience’s cognitive process through perspicuity.

Rhetorical scholars have long regarded identification as a concept central to Kenneth Burke’s work. However, a close reading of Burke’s work of the 1930s locates the early incarnations of identification in the dialectical relationship between human embodiment and symbolicity. By restoring the complications neglected by a largely symbolic approach to identification through increased attention to the body and the material consequences of symbolicity, a revised understanding of Burkean identification captures more effectively the complex material and symbolic divisions that characterize human social life and prescribes means of negotiating these divisions.

Because the goals leaders and organizations seek typically require persistent engagement over time, rhetorical leadership has as a central concern the long-term consequences of the leader’s rhetorical choices. Although traditional rhetorical theory downplayed this long-term perspective in favor of the singular rhetorical engagement (such as a speech), rhetorical theorists have begun considering the rhetorical implications of persuasion wrought over the long-run. This essay applies rhetorical consequentialism, a theoretical perspective developed by the author, to explain the orientation and strategies the rhetorical leader must consider in longterm persuasion. Leaders must be concerned about consistency over time to avoid charges of waffl ing, delusion, lying, hypocrisy, and the like if they are to maintain their ethos and that of their organizations. They also should take positive steps to create the symbolic and material conditions for rhetorical success over the long run. The essay describes „constraint avoidance” strategies that limit inconsistencies over time, as well as „stage-setting” strategies that prepare the symbolic and material ground for future rhetorical success. The essay draws examples from American political rhetoric, especially that of Donald Trump, to illuminate these strategies. The essay concludes by considering the challenges and prospects of such strategies.

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical identification. Specifically, these organizational members gained this agency by reproducing certain values and identities through epideictic rhetoric in order to encourage collective action and effect organizational change from the bottom up.

As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from raising human awareness of problems “out there” to renegotiating the very boundaries between human and nonhuman communities. This shift—along with the advent of online media, which similarly blurs traditional urban versus rural boundaries between communities—invites us to update classic studies of advocacy rhetoric from the 1990s and early 2000s. Accordingly, this study addresses advocates’ use of online media in the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Project. I reconstruct wildlife advocates’ attitudes toward the Project, as expressed online in press releases and blog posts, by using a combination of topology—a method that looks at patterns of topoi (shared beliefs, values, and norms) that a community expresses in a given rhetorical situation—and Kenneth Burke’s theories of attitudes and identification. I then compare advocates’ attitudes with the attitudes of project administrators and landowners in the reintroduction area, reconstructed in earlier work. I conclude that advocates amplify their identification with allies (chiefly wolves and supportive sectors of “the public”) and their alienation from competitors (chiefly public-land ranchers and project administrators) via the creation of “straw attitudes” for these communities that conflict both with their own attitude and with the documented attitudes of these communities. This rhetorical strategy creates a zero-sum political scenario for communication in the Project and recapitulates old political divisions in the southwestern United States. I finish by recommending rhetorical strategies aimed to increase identification, rather than alienation, in the Project and by showing what online advocacy rhetoric can teach us about the structure of Burkean theories of identification.

Reviews 323 demonstrating that Nonnus was thoroughly at home in the topoi that belong to TrocpocxXrpixoi Zoyoi. The case studies that follow, however, home in on exceptional instances, such as that of Typhon addressing his own limbs as if they were soldiers (Dionysiaca 2.258-355). This way of proceeding leaves unclear whether Nonnus's handling of topoi can really be characterized in terms of him "inverting and parodying these traditional elements" (p. 296); for the most part, he seems quite conventional here. The structure of Chapter 5 means that the discussion of the speech by an Achaean sailor look­ ing at Europa (Dionysiaca 1.93-124; discussed on pp. 236-42) is widely sepa­ rated from Hera's speech about the same event (Dionysiaca 1.326-43; discussed on pp. 262—1), so that bringing out the purposeful connections between the two involves a good deal of repetition. In general, Verhelst occa­ sionally has a tendency to paraphrase and summarize in cases where more analysis is required—but some of this is perhaps inevitable when dealing with the Dionysiaca, which is not a book that is very familiar even to scholars specializing in late antiquity. And Verhelst is to be applauded for her efforts to make her book appeal to a wider community of classicists; she certainly succeeds in making Nonnus sound more interesting than the picture of him in the standard handbooks would suggest. The book is on the whole free from blemishes, give or take a few typos (e.g., for "248" in the title on p. 306, read "48.248"), unidiomatic expressions (e.g. the Dutchism "hunting for effect" on p. X) and minor mistakes (e.g. on p. 103, where the exhortative topoi concerning to oouyepox and to ¿x3r(o6u£vov are strangely equated with the consequences of "victory" and "defeat," respectively). Unfortunately (and due to no mis­ take of the author), the book is set in accordance with the bizarre editorial decision taken some time ago by Brill (also in evidence in other recent publications) to print all single-letter and unpunctuated abbreviations in small caps, so that one finds side by side references to, say, Nonnus's Par. and d. (instead of D.), Euripides's Bacch. and ia (instead of IA) or, in bibliographical references, "Ann Arbor (Mich.)" and "Cambridge (uk)." It is to be hoped that Brill will soon abandon this silly convention. Luuk EIuitink Leiden University Brian Gogan, jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. 234 pp. ISBN: 9780809336258 Baudrillard has always been difficult to categorize. He began life as a German studies scholar and translator, taught sociology as well as philos­ ophy, and later in life became a general commentator on culture, politics, and society. He was a photographer, a theory pop star, an aphorist and 324 RHETORICA a provocateur. Brian Gogan argues that he is best understood as a rhetori­ cal theorist. He offers a serviceable compact overview of Baudrillard's vast oeuvre in this book. He writes clearly and signposts his argument abun­ dantly. He often relies more on citation of secondary sources than a close reading of Baudrillard's texts. Baudrillard's most famous concept is the "simulacrum.'' While diffi­ cult, the simulacrum is perhaps best understood as a likeness without a referent. In the era of "fake news" and "alternative facts," this idea is per­ haps easier to accept than it was when introduced in the seventies and eighties. While the proliferation of simulacra has been accelerated by social media and our ability to simulate and disseminate anything imagin­ able, simulacra, like the poor, have always been with us. Gogan asks us to understand the concept of the simulacrum in terms of three central motifs that make up Baudrillard's rhetorical theory: the art of appearance, the art of disappearance, and symbolic exchange. The art of appearance is the production of a simulacrum that need not be tied to any pre-existing object. Nonetheless, the simulacrum rhetorically functions in the world as if it were a representation, and it can be reproduced endlessly creating its own functional economy. We might think of certain forms of advertising or even internet myths...

Reviews Berenice Verhelst, Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca: Narrative and Rhetorical Functions of the Characters' "Varied" and "Many-Faceted" Words. (Mnemosyne Supplements 397), Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2017. XI + 330 pp. ISBN: 9789004325890 The epic poem Dionysiaca, written by Nonnus of Panopolis sometime in the fifth century ce in 48 books, is the longest surviving poem from antiq­ uity. It relays the god Dionysus's childhood and youth, his expedition to India and his eventually triumphant return to Europe, in a sprawling, extremely discursive narrative. It is a notoriously difficult work to get a han­ dle on, and Verhelst does her readers a real service by including a summary of the poem in an appendix to the book under review (pp. 302-7). Amidst a recent upsurge of scholarly interest in Nonnus (the main fruits of which are ably reviewed in the introduction), Verhelst—in her first monograph—seeks to deepen our understanding of the special character of the Dionysiaca and the literary culture from which it sprang by focusing on a single prominent aspect of the poem, namely the form and function of its 305 directly repor­ ted speeches. Taken together, these speeches comprise 7,573 of the poem's 21,286 lines. Her hunch that an analysis of the speeches is a productive way to approach Nonnus's zorziZH on the whole pays off handsomely. Verhelst has written a book that is in many ways illuminating and will be essential reading for anyone interested in Nonnus and late-antique litera­ ture more generally as well as in the interaction between rhetorical theory and literary practice. A lengthy introduction globally compares Nonnus's strategies of speech representation to those of Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Quintus of Smyrna. It shows that Nonnus's speeches both occur with a higher frequency and are on average significantly longer than those of his predecessors. In addition, Nonnus displays a marked preference for giving speeches to relatively minor characters, who also only speak once, and for representing monologues over dialogues. 78% of speeches stand alone, as opposed to only 14% in the Iliad, for instance. Both these initial observations raise questions about the nature and function of represented speeches in the Dionysiaca, as they appear to run counter to the idea, often found in scholarship on earlier Greek epics, that speeches serve to show how characters interact with one another and how they develop through Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 3, pp. 321-330. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 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.2019.37.3.321 322 RHETORICA successive speeches. The body of Verhelst's book is divided into two parts, each with three chapters. The first part aims to show that Nonnus's spee­ ches are the product of a refined interplay between the conventions governing speech representation in the earlier literary tradition and the overtly formalistic rhetorical "bent" of late-antique culture. The second homes in on the narrative functions of the set speeches in the Dionysiaca. Except for Chapter 6, which contains an in-depth analysis of the speeches in the Beroe episode (Dionysiaca 41-43), each chapter combines a survey of the topic under discussion (e.g. "Tiç-speeches" in Chapter 3, or "persuasive speeches" in Chapter 4) with a number of more specific case studies. The strength of Verhelst's treatment throughout is that she fruitfully uses the speeches to synthesize and to confirm or modify emerging strands in recent scholarship on Nonnus and to suggest further lines of inquiry. For example, while scattered publications have focused on particular intertexts of the Dionysiaca, Verhelst makes a convincing case that, in order truly to understand the texture of Nonnus's poetry, we need to be aware of how he is constantly conscious of and playing with essentially the whole Greek tradition, including not only epic, but also tragedy, lyric, the novel, histori­ ography, rhetorical theory, and even the visual arts. A...

Book Review| June 01 2019 Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy: The Living Art of Michael C. Leff Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy: The Living Art of Michael C. Leff. Edited by Antonio De Velasco, John Angus Campbell, and David Henry. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2016; pp. xxiv + 481. $39.95 paper; $31.95 e-book. Leah Ceccarelli Leah Ceccarelli University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (2): 323–326. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.2.0323 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Leah Ceccarelli; Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy: The Living Art of Michael C. Leff. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2019; 22 (2): 323–326. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.2.0323 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Using Burke’s notion of terminological screens, we perform a cluster analysis on Donald Trump’s inaugural address. We discovered keywords that appeared to point to Trump’s stock campaign phrase, Make America Great Again: we, Washington, D.C., people, you/your, and America. Our analysis seeks to explain how the phrase's rhetorical presence in Trump’s inaugural address opened and closed possibilities for unity and division, and ultimately allowed for an inaugural speech reception on par with prior presidents

In this article, I examine a terminology of violence rooted within political consensus. Taking the Rwandan genocide as a case study, the article argues that a Burkean dialectic transformation of terms offers a way to understand violent conflicts with an agonistic approach. Arguing against consensus, the article puts Burke into conversation with Chantal Mouffe to show where merger might be possible amongst antagonistic parties.

Divisive rhetoric abounds in the United States on the topic of racism. Finding productive and holistic ways of analyzing and discussing racism are vital. This essay proposes the use of the pentad method (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) and dramatic framing from Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism as useful toward that end. A case study of analyzing a racial narrative is performed on Nelson Mandela’s famous 1964 Rivonia Trial speech. In this paramount speech, Mandela advocates for a pragmatic transformation through agency and uses a comic frame to address the problem of racism in Apartheid. This essay concludes with a discussion of how the pentad and dramatic framing can be used to address racism by encouraging constructive dialogue and creative rhetorical approaches.

Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley, has become an international star in biological anthropology and evolutionary neuroscience. His empirical research appears to provide intriguing precursors to, and confirmations of, Kenneth Burke’s dramatism/logology. However, Deacon’s data and theory call into question Burke’s usually unnuanced distinction between symbolic “action” and nonsymbolic “motion .” This essay explores the four intersections between Deacon’s evolutionary theory and Burke’s dramatism that inform the apparent “Deacon”-struction of Burke’s action/motion claim.

As a critical introduction to Harry Chapin’s documentary about Kenneth Burke, this essay is part of the ongoing Kenneth Burke Digital Archive . This essay provides both historical and critical contexts for various subjects in the documentary, which was first released in VHS format 25 years ago.

In this article, I examine a terminology of violence rooted within political consensus. Taking the Rwandan genocide as a case study, the article argues that a Burkean dialectic transformation of terms offers a way to understand violent conflicts with an agonistic approach. Arguing against consensus, the article puts Burke into conversation with Chantal Mouffe to show where merger might be possible amongst antagonistic parties.

As a critical introduction to Harry Chapin’s documentary about Kenneth Burke, this essay is part of the ongoing Kenneth Burke Digital Archive . This essay provides both historical and critical contexts for various subjects in the documentary, which was first released in VHS format 25 years ago.

Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley, has become an international star in biological anthropology and evolutionary neuroscience. His empirical research appears to provide intriguing precursors to, and confirmations of, Kenneth Burke’s dramatism/logology. However, Deacon’s data and theory call into question Burke’s usually unnuanced distinction between symbolic “action” and nonsymbolic “motion .” This essay explores the four intersections between Deacon’s evolutionary theory and Burke’s dramatism that inform the apparent “Deacon”-struction of Burke’s action/motion claim.

Divisive rhetoric abounds in the United States on the topic of racism. Finding productive and holistic ways of analyzing and discussing racism are vital. This essay proposes the use of the pentad method (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) and dramatic framing from Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism as useful toward that end. A case study of analyzing a racial narrative is performed on Nelson Mandela’s famous 1964 Rivonia Trial speech. In this paramount speech, Mandela advocates for a pragmatic transformation through agency and uses a comic frame to address the problem of racism in Apartheid. This essay concludes with a discussion of how the pentad and dramatic framing can be used to address racism by encouraging constructive dialogue and creative rhetorical approaches.

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

This article considers how demagoguery gives meaning to violence by providing a symbolic, expressive outlet for resentment resulting from real or felt precarity. This rhetorical process redirects frustrations away from the entities and sociopolitical structures responsible for creating precarity and toward a scapegoat. Rather than examining demagoguery as rhetoric produced by an individual rhetor or consumed by an audience of the masses, the author explores the “meso-level” of demagogic discourse: the organizations called into existence and motivated by individuals’ shared identification with a symbolic struggle against an imagined Other. This phenomenon is illustrated through a close reading of the Proud Boys, a multinational fraternal organization that uses an aesthetic of libertarianism to advance a fascist politic.

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to de-link the study of the Rigveda from both colonial philology and ongoing Hindu nationalist projects. It brings the rhetoric of form, especially as theorized by Kenneth Burke, to open up space for critics and commentators with a broader range of relationships to Brahmanical liturgy. To further the goal of delinking, it first narrows the scope of analysis to dialogue hymns, which are reminiscent of debates found within Buddhist conversion narratives rendered in versified Sanskrit. It then centers formal linguistic figures that these two layers of Sanskrit poetry have in common. Finally, conceptualizing these formal devices, it uses analytic categories from a South Asian critical tradition (alaṃkāraśāstra). Framed and constrained in this manner and applied to the (ex-)lovers’ quarrel of Purūravas and Urvaśī (in R.V. 10.95), a Burkean analysis reveals an exchange that both satisfies the “appetites” and allays the concerns of conservative audiences, who otherwise might fear that their wives could follow Urvaśī’s example and happily part with their wedded partners-in-sacrifice.

In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke wrote that rhetorical style is nothing more than ingratiation—an attempt to gain approval by saying the right thing in the right context. Marie Lund’s commendable goal in An Argument on Rhetorical Style is to argue beyond this understanding and achieve a greater conceptual consensus on style for rhetorical scholars and critics. Lund does this by developing her own concept of “constitutive style,” making style valuable as an aesthetic aspect of rhetoric, a deliberate rhetorical strategy, and an analytical category comprising communicative actions, identity constructions, and social influence. She achieves this lofty goal by re-theorizing rhetorical style, exhibiting skillful stylistic analyses in selected popular and social contexts, examining the concept of style from historical eras including the postmodern, and analyzing style from several critical perspectives. This rich and important work provides a fresh, appropriate and comprehensive framework for scholars to analyze rhetorical style from textual, interactional, social and theoretical angles. Lund invokes and engages historically with accounts of style from the classical Greek and Roman periods to the present, and does not disappoint in synthesizing these traditions before creating her transcendent “constitutive style” contribution.Lund’s book is separated into two parts—“Rhetorical Style as a Critical Concept” and “Critical Perspectives.” Three chapters are dedicated to each part. The goal of these chapters is to make style “both powerful and useful in line with other concepts in the practical and critical disciplines of rhetoric” (11). Lund argues that style needs to be re-theorized in order to accomplish this goal and introduces an expansive dialogue between research traditions in order to do so. By separating the book into these sections, Lund illuminates previously fragmented analyses of rhetorical style and is able to bring a synthesized framework to focus for the critic. She begins by covering the range of definitions of style since antiquity and explores the Sophistic treatment of style as constitutively inventive, transformational, and performative. She then guides the reader through some of the earliest etymologies of style (stylus), as well as the modern conceptions of “Style as Dress” and “Style as Man.” She describes these historical and modern definitions of style in precise detail and explains how some of them have retained analytical utility while others fall short. For example, although she sees all three conceptions of style (“Style as Dress,” “Style as Man,” and her “Constitutive Style”) as viable formations in shaping our current perceptions of style, she doesn’t view them as equally effective. She draws on Gerard A. Hauser’s view that rhetoric is not only a strategic process but also a “social practice which constructs a reality” (49). Moreover, she argues that style constitutes our social relations, moral actions, identity constructions, and worldviews. She rejects the simplicity of the topos “Style as Dress,” which characterizes style as a rhetorical ornament that dresses thought. Although Lund recognizes the aestheticizing aspect of style as worthwhile and viable for criticism, she opposes the fundamental separation of style from thought inherent in rhetoric’s five classical canons: invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. A “Style as Dress” reduction ignores the inventive nature of style and the notion that all five canons can operate constitutively. Moreover, she rejects the presently loose versions of “Style as Man,” which convey the identity of the speaker as purely constituted through language.Instead, Lund proposes a re-theorization of style as “rhetorical language that constructs a social practice and may be turned into particular rhetorical strategies,” depending upon “the particulars of the rhetorical situation, and also, to some extent, the frame and focus of the critic” (50). It is here where Lund argues for an official third topos—“Style as Constitutive”—exploring the inventive side of constitutive rhetoric and how invented styles are ultimately performed. She supports her overall argument by weaving relevant and robust rhetorical analyses throughout her theoretical elaborations across chapters. For example, after taking stock of the contemporary research of rhetorical figures in chapter two, she analyzes how rhetorical figures function in Danish hip-hop style. She does so to “present rhetorical figures and style as significant analytical concepts that are part of a comprehensive theoretical complex” (86). This analysis is a rich, detailed and cohesive foundation for her analysis of constitutive style as argument. She includes rhetorical devices such as figures of speech and metaphor and re-conceptualizes them beyond mere ornament, substitution or value-addition. These views range from the classical to the postmodern, and Lund is able to admirably rise above them and bring clarity to the conceptual ambiguity concerning style and rhetorical devices. By drawing upon the constitutive function of rhetorical figures, Lund shows that strategic devices can be examined, not only as effective means for persuasion, but also as contributing to the very idea, topic, or style created. This is conveyed in her analysis of the Danish hip-hop style, where rhetorical figures are used strategically as textual and argumentative devices within a systematized cultural style.Lund wraps up Part I by examining the development of style in recent rhetorical criticism, noting equivalence between her constitutive style and the constructions of style brought forth by Barry Brummett and Bradford Vivian. However, Lund invokes an analysis of Danish political style to separate and bolster her own constitutive conception. She examines Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Opening Address on the First Assembly of the Danish Parliament in 2011 to illuminate the amalgamation of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical style. She concludes that Thorning-Schmidt’s style is constitutive of collaboration, creating “the qualities, ethics, and aesthetics of cooperation rhetorically, in its practice” (121). In this way, style is developed as constitutive of rhetorical strategies, essential qualities, and as orientations toward rhetorical situations.Part II of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is dedicated to an elaboration of three critical perspectives that may be adopted when analyzing rhetorical styles: feminine, provocative, and speechwriting. The chapters include critical analyses from the three perspectives. Lund argues for the significance of constitutive style as a theoretical and critical construct, designating provocative style as a critical concept comprising argumentative stylistic devices in an interpretive frame, feminine style as a flawed rhetorical strategy, and speechwriting as dependent on her constitutive framework in order to be analyzed as stylistically constructing meaning, identity and performance at the textual level. Ultimately, Lund is dedicated to enabling the critic with a constitutive topos that recognizes the “rhetorical effects of using style to argumentative and strategic ends” (203). Style is thus constitutive of “so-called substantial qualities such as meaning, ideas, argumentation, political action, cultural values, identity, and gender” (208).Marie Lund has synthesized the work on style in rhetoric and related fields and has added to the tradition her own construct, “constitutive style.” An Argument on Rhetorical Style covers the full range of what is known about rhetorical style and advances the scholarship in admirable, pragmatic and analytical fashion. Future scholars can now adopt this new framework to further engage rhetorical style beyond the feminine, provocative, and speechwriting—something Lund was unable to fully accomplish in this comprehensive work. The limited number of critical perspectives expounded upon in Part II warrants closer attention and further contribution. Overall, the theory and critical application of constitutive style provides scholars from different critical approaches with an important, comprehensive take on rhetorical style.

This article offers a revision to an existing social science methodology, Q methodology, through “Q-Rhetoric.” After detailing Q methodology’s theoretical underpinnings and practical method, and persistent critiques of the methodology, the article employs perspectives from rhetorical theory and Amerindian anthropology to suggest a methodological correction. It concludes by detailing the use of Q-Rhetoric to intervene in a Wisconsin stream management controversy, proposing Q-Rhetoric as a pragmatic and theoretically sound methodology for working across disciplinary divides.

“We wonder where the rhetorical theory is for unsettling this resting place when it turns out to be a place of oppression for others?” —Sutton and Mifsud, A Revolution in Tropes, p. xiii.In a time ...

Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional identification in rhetoric’s critical literature. Doing so reveals the same “imagined marginality” seen in the broader public discourse, of counterpublic rhetoric that circulates an identification of exclusion from dominant identity. Southern regional theory and critical regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insider-outsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.

In the nineteenth century, religious tract distribution was a popular form of evangelism. Drawing on evidence from the American Tract Society’s periodical, American Tract Magazine, and tract society reports, this essay claims tract distribution as an early site for women’s rhetorical education. While distributing tracts, women received a door-to-door rhetorical education where they acquired and honed skills including canvassing, establishing ethos, and adapting appeals and evidence to different audiences and rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this essay contributes to a broader understanding of what counts as rhetorical education and how and where that education takes place.

For those of us who went to graduate school during the 1970s and 1980s, our understanding of early-modern rhetoric was shaped in large part by a preoccupation with clarifying the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. The curriculum at that time usually included a heavy dose of secondary literature by scholars in the tradition of Wilbur Samuel Howell, Karl Wallace, Douglas Ehninger, Vincent Bevilacqua, and Lloyd Bitzer. A common theme in those readings was an investment in mapping the primary texts of modern rhetorical theory against the background of metaphysics and epistemology. Occasionally, we read an essay like Walter Ong's “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind,” which suggested a different approach to the subject. However, our interest in documenting the influence of Francis Bacon's scientific method on Joseph Priestley's theory of rhetorical invention or of explaining how George Campbell responded to David Hume's skepticism left us with little time to explore the influence of commercial culture on modern rhetorical theory—even in cases that probably should have been obvious like Adam Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres or Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric.Today, many of us who were originally trained as historians of rhetoric find ourselves surrounded by colleagues who dismiss the history of rhetoric courses as hopelessly passé. In fact, if we're honest, even for those of us who embrace the history of rhetoric as an essential component of liberal arts education, our files of lectures about the intricacies of Enlightenment rhetorical theory can seem increasingly remote and tired. As Christopher Hill once explained, every generation is faced with the task of rewriting history in its own way: “although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors” (1972, 15). The challenge facing historians of rhetoric, in other words, is this: how do we reframe Enlightenment rhetoric to reveal its relevance in our lives today?In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker suggests a “way in” to modern rhetorical theory that is likely to resonate with many twenty-first-century readers. Instead of approaching Enlightenment rhetoric as a reaction to modern theories of metaphysics and epistemology, Longaker reconfigures the subject around compelling problems of economics and ethics. For example, in an age of free-market capitalism and consumer culture, what is the moral grounding for our obligation to transparency and honesty in our rhetorical transactions? When attempting to flourish in an economic system that gives its highest rewards to self-interested instrumentalism and greed, is it still possible to cultivate a sense of altruism, honor, or loyalty toward others? And, furthermore, as we find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly privatized, competitive, and commercialized “marketplace of ideas,” how do we reconcile the values of free speech with the values of rhetorical decorum and politeness? For anyone who worries about the practical fallout of these sorts of questions, Longaker provides a compelling reminder that “our age is not exceptional. From its seventeenth-century financial beginning through its nineteenth-century industrial episode to its twenty-first century digital projection, capitalism has been thoroughly rhetorical” (11). In expanding upon this claim, Longaker proceeds recursively in relation to four case studies: John Locke on clarity, Adam Smith on probity, Hugh Blair on moderation, and Herbert Spencer on economy.Chapter 1 examines John Locke's obsession with discursive clarity and its role in commercial contracts. Traditional readings of book 3 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (the treatment of the “abuses of words” and the remedies for those abuses) tend to place a heavy emphasis on Locke's relationship to British empirical sciences as inspired by his involvement with the Royal Society of London for the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge. While this focus on epistemology and scientific inquiry did obviously play an important role in Locke's analysis of the subject, Longaker advises historians of rhetoric that there is more to the story. His close reading of the Essay makes clear that Locke's attacks on sophistry and rhetoric are unusually vitriolic and inconsistent with other statements Locke made about the significance of verbal imprecision in the sciences. If we pay attention to the evolution of early drafts of Locke's Essay and if we read the Essay against the background of Locke's other writings on issues having to do with economics and business finance, we begin to realize that his frequent allusions to the relationship between argument and commerce and his analogies between sophistry and financial dishonesty are not just stylistic embellishments. Longaker explains that Locke's rule about linguistic propriety “is not just a stylistic guideline, nor is it principally a political suggestion. Locke believed that propriety in currency and language preserves commercial stability, since propriety depends on consent, and consent to a common medium permits financial and conversational exchange” (22). Longaker examines Locke's conception of an ethical obligation to propriety in commercial interactions. He then explains how Locke's requirement for clarity and his rule against disputation were implicated not only in his theory of natural law and social contract theory, but also in his analysis of misrepresentation in financial contracts. Longaker concludes the chapter with a survey of Locke's writings on education. He demonstrates how Locke's writings emphasized a “rhetorical pedagogy of clarity” (37) as an essential component in the education of the new merchant classes.In chapter 2, Longaker turns to Adam Smith's analysis of sincerity and probity. He begins by reviewing the common assumption that Smith's version of free-market capitalism transforms all goods and services into commodities, such that the value of bourgeois virtue is defined as a transactional calculation of prudence. As Smith said in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we expect [their probity]… but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith quoted by Longaker 44). That is to say, any claims about moral obligation within a capitalist system appear to be grounded in a claim to expedience—protecting one's reputation in the marketplace (in the short term, and also in the long term). However, as Longaker explains, this common interpretation of Smith is faulty. The interpretation persists because key passages have been read out of context. A more robust reading of Smith would strive to examine these passages against the background of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762), and Smith's lectures on jurisprudence (c. 1754–1764). Longaker succinctly summarizes his survey of this literature by asserting that Smith did not, in fact, define probity as merely a “ruthless calculation of interest”: “Honesty may be prudent, and the prudent man may be honest, but he is not honest because he is prudent. Probity comes from a felt sense of right, which leads to an honest rhetorical style” (44). Longaker devotes most of chapter 2 to unpacking these claims—and, more generally, to explaining the recurring problem in Enlightenment ethics regarding the relationships between instrumental reason, moral feeling, habit, and ethical character. Longaker explains how Smith posited the psychological mechanism of fellow feeling or sympathy as the basis for capitalism's “two legal pillars,” property and contract (56–57). The capacity for sympathy can only be cultivated through the exercise of imagination—not through reason. With Smith, we see the beginnings of a decline in classical invention and the rise of aesthetics and belletristic criticism as dominating forces in rhetorical pedagogy. Longaker concludes the chapter with an examination of Smith's efforts “at promoting rhetorical criticism of imaginative literature to illustrate how he wanted students to study, discern, and produce honest discourse in the free arenas of civil society: the literary salon, the commodities exchange, and the rhetoric classroom” (44).Longaker presents Locke and Smith as having been generally optimistic about capitalism as a force for social improvement. Capitalism promotes rhetorical virtue in the sense that clarity is a necessary condition for meeting the obligations of financial contracts. Further, a felt sense of sympathy and of sincerity is an essential condition for becoming an effective participant in the marketplace. Later writers, however, became increasingly cynical about the relationship between virtue and commerce. Virtue and commerce “seemed sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory forces.” This ambivalence prompted the question, “Did capitalism make people good, or did good people make commerce possible?” (74). In chapter 3, Longaker takes this question as the starting point for his analysis of Hugh Blair. Conceding that Blair was not a systematic or consistent thinker, Longaker brings a sense of order to his analysis by focusing on Blair's participation in a debate among eighteenth-century intellectuals regarding the vice of licentiousness and the corrupting influence of material luxuries. Reviewing statements by writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Daniel Defoe, Longaker asserts that Blair's most important contribution to the “luxury debates” was the “bourgeois virtue of moderation” which would provide “a ballast to right a commercial ship listing toward overconsumption” (79). Specifically, “Christian morals and republican virtue teach good habits of moderate consumption and personal savings, habits that support commerce by ensuring reinvestment and by preventing overconsumption” (74). In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Blair gave his students a guide to rhetorical moderation by crafting a synthesis between Locke's demand for verbal clarity and Smith's celebration of sentimental figures (88).In chapter 4, Longaker turns to Herbert Spencer as “the proper inheritor of the British Enlightenment's integration of ethics, economics, and style” but who, in the end, tracked the “decline and fall of rhetorical style and bourgeois virtue” (101). Spencer's essay “The Philosophy of Style” (1852) is usually remembered for its treatment of language as a source of “friction” which hinders the “machinery” of the human intellect: “the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived” (Spencer quoted by Longaker 102). This famous description of the “economics of style” grew out of Spencer's work in industrial engineering and his analysis of the need for efficient communication within large corporations. But Longaker claims that this is actually the least interesting feature of Spencer's analysis of style: “More interesting and more important is Spencer's adherence to the British Enlightenment faith that rhetorical style can facilitate sympathy; will ameliorate humanity, and must advance commerce” (103). This optimism that permeated Spencer's rhetorical economics was a product of his belief in the Enlightenment's theory of historical progress. He believed in the power of capitalism—not so much as an artificial creation of human beings but as a divinely ordained necessity in human evolution. Over time, however, Spencer learned to distinguish biological evolution from social evolution. In the process, according to Longaker, he became increasingly skeptical about the role and significance of individual agency. Ultimately, Spencer's fascination with the mechanisms of a deterministic evolution led him to turn away from rhetorical education and from the imaginative arts all together. As Longaker explains, Spencer “lost faith in the individual's ability to purposefully cultivate bourgeois virtue” (123).The narrative arc of Longaker's survey is clear and perspicacious. Although he examines a limited number of canonical texts in Enlightenment rhetorical theory, by shifting the frame of analysis from epistemology to economics, he succeeds in uncovering in those familiar texts many original and compelling insights. If there is any criticism one might offer, it is that, at times, the narrative is too neat and too economical. Longaker focuses so scrupulously on a progression of ideas that he sometimes neglects complicating issues that—on closer examination—may also turn out to be relevant. For example, he devotes little attention to the influence of the classical traditions of invention and argument on Enlightenment rhetoric. However, one can't help but be curious about how classical notions of scientific discovery and rhetorical advocacy were reconciled with Adam Smith's theory of economic growth in commercial society—which depends on the division of labor and specialization in the labor force (including both physical and intellectual labor). Although it may have distracted from Longaker's central interest by drawing us back to the more familiar grounds of rhetoric and epistemology, the tendency toward intellectual fragmentation—which undermines modern usage of the classical topoi—does seem to be important to any discussion of rhetorical pedagogy and bourgeois ethics. So, for instance, by ending his narrative with Spencer, Longaker overlooks other writers (John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Alexander Bain, and John Ruskin, for example) who were preoccupied with responding to Smith's division of labor because of its dangerously dehumanizing implications. The project of reframing public discourse—and specifically, of reframing public argument—in a way that would secure social justice as a constraining value to commercial culture became pervasive to nineteenth-century ethics and economics.Longaker's “rebranding” of Hugh Blair as a “moderate man” who “taught bourgeois virtue to offset the vice of luxury and to prevent the corruption of commerce” (98) is an intriguing claim. But for those of us who are accustomed to reading Blair's lectures against the backdrop of neo-classical rhetoric and eighteenth-century classical education, the argument is not entirely convincing. For example, dating at least to Charles Rollin's The Ancient History (1729), Greek history had been a stage for attacking the commercial decadence of Athenian “popular culture” and for defending an elite “high culture.” Blair's disdain for disputation and for popular oratory and his endorsement of polite belles lettres reenacted a standard trope in eighteenth-century debates about class and economic stratification. Longaker's interpretation of Blair might be more convincing had he acknowledged this historical context—or at least provided greater attention to the way Blair's notion of belles lettres would be mobilized as a class marker.Finally, it is surprising that Longaker grants Richard Whately only a brief reference in his text. Whately was, after all, a major force in nineteenth-century British interpretation of rhetoric and of political economy. A prolific writer, he offered commentary on diverse subjects that seem directly relevant to the question of bourgeois virtue: tolerance and partisanship, charity and covetousness, luxury, argumentative clarity and consistency, humility and moral judgment, and the relationship between reason and passion in persuasive discourse. Granted, any careful examination of Whately on rhetoric, economics, and ethics, would easily fill a book by itself. Still, one suspects that by adding someone like Whately to this discussion the project might have gained an extra level of depth and nuance.Despite these minor disappointments, the bottom line is that Longaker's work stands as essential reading for anyone who is interested in the relationship between rhetoric and economics. In fact, for all of us who face the prospect of spending the remainder of our careers responding to the consequences of a collective investment in Trumpean economics—and at a time in which the Supreme Court has declared that “money is speech”—Longaker's analysis gives us ample motivation to rethink our assumptions about the relevance of Enlightenment rhetorical theory to our twenty-first-century predicament. John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer each grappled with moral problems that are surprisingly similar to problems we face today. Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue may not provide a comprehensive study of the subject, but it is an impressive point of entry that is likely to inspire compelling research for the future.

Using data from 88 students, 20 advisers, and 24 hirers about U.S. résumés, this article focuses on face of the company, the concept of employers' evaluating how well applicants might represent a company. The results of applying rhetorical listening’s identification–disidentification to “face” suggested two outcomes and their implications. First, primary audiences invoked secondary audiences to the point in which they conflated, suggesting that résumés should incorporate secondary audiences. Second, hirers sometimes violated their own beliefs about diversity hiring because of audiences they invoked, suggesting that because invoking audience can perpetuate inequitable hiring practices, hirers should be more nuanced about the audiences they choose.

Aby wyjaśnić fenomen popularności Księcia Niccola Machiavellego, należy wskazać na osobliwy sposób komunikowania się autora tego dzieła z czytelnikiem. Autor przedstawia siebie jako fachowca z dziedziny sztuki politycznej, za swoich czytelników zaś chce mieć jedynie tych, którzy, jak on, znają się na rzeczy. Charakterystyczny zimny i, z pozoru przynajmniej, nieozdobny styl, jakim posługuje się autor Księcia, podkreśla dodatkowo profesjonalny i nieosobisty stosunek pisarza do przedmiotu jego rozważań. W kategoriach teorii retorycznej taki sposób komunikowania się daje się opisać jako poszukiwanie okrężnych dróg do tego, co Kenneth Burke określał mianem konsubstancjacji retorycznej. Mówca stara się przemawiać do widowni w sposób charakterystyczny dla komunikacji zakulisowej, aby w ten sposób dać jej członkom poczucie uczestnictwa we wspólnocie fachowców, do której włączeni są przez podążanie za mistrzem w sztuce, który reprezentowany jest przez przemawiającego do nich autora Księcia. Z tego rodzaju komunikowaniem spotykamy się w dziejach kultury wszędzie tam, gdzie do głosu dochodzi element cyniczności, którego istotą jest właśnie ów zakulisowy sposób komunikacji. Znaleźć go można na przykład we fragmentach Wojny peloponeskiej Tukidydesa czy na kartach dialogów Platona, w których konfrontuje on moralizm Sokratesa z immoralizmem sofistów.

In 1939, Kenneth Burke, reviewing the first translated, unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf for The Southern Review, complained in the introduction that earlier reviews were long on condemnation and...

Thomas A. Discenna Davos Redux: Language and Ethics in the Work of Cassirer and Rhetorical Theory I As I had not expected to find it in him, I must confess that I have found a neo-Kantian here in Heidegger.1 f the history7 of Western thought is replete with individuals that one might euphemistically label as "characters," prone to extremes not only in their thought and writings but in their private lives as well, then Ernst Cassirer must be regarded as something of an outlier.2 Recognized by his contemporaries for an unerring sense of equanimity, his evenhandedness as a scholar was a value that he affirmed even when it may have perhaps been better to lay down gauntlets and more forcefully defend positions he held dear? Indeed, at the conclusion to the famous Davos Disputation, a performance was held at which the participants, Cassirer and Heidegger, were caricatured by their students, Emmanuel Levinas playing the part of Cassirer repeating "I am in a conciliatory mood" over and over while flour flowed from atop his head, and out of his pockets, a "cruel allusion to Cassirer's intellectual poverty and 1 Ernst Cassirer in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics. 5th Ed., enlarged. Trans. Robert Taft. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 193. It should be noted that this phrase and much of Cassirer's opening remarks do not appear in the two other translations of the Davos Disputation. 2See, for instance, Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers (New York: Vintage, 2008); Andrew Shaffer, Great Philosophers who failed at love (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011). 3This is not to suggest that such positions did not exist only that his defense ot them bore the stamp of a conciliatory attitude that balanced even the most extreme of positions. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 189-197, ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 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 Rights and Permissions website, at http://www. ucpressjoumals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.189 190 RHETORICA defeat/'4 As much as it may be true that Levinas's caricature mocked his teacher's "failure" at Davos it is simultaneously an allusion to Cassirer's fundamental equability, a trait that permeates his work and, apparently, his very being. Thus, it seems strange, or perhaps entirely appropriate, that such a character should, in this contemporary age of extremes, be found at the center of contentious intellectual disputes regarding the meaning and importance of his philosophical legacy. Following an extended period when studies of Cassirer were, more or less, moribund save for stalwarts such as John Michael Krois and Donald Philip Verene, a renewed interest in his work seems to have taken root, though, perhaps inevitably, there seems no hope of consensus regarding what it all might mean. Now that very unCassirerean spirit of contention seems to have come to the field of rhetorical studies where in this journal two articles representing contrasting interpretations of Cassirer's intellectual contributions to our understanding of rhetoric have been published in recent years.5 My ambition in the first article was threefold: First, to con­ tribute to the literature surrounding the now famous debate between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos by reading it as an instantiation of the ongoing conversation between rhetoric and philosophy; second, through such a reading to question recent efforts to appropriate Heidegger's work for advancing metaphysi­ cal claims for rhetorical work; and, finally, and most importantly, to initiate a conversation among rhetoricians concerning the utility of Cassirer's work by offering "a case for reading Cassirer's philos­ ophy of symbolic forms as both a metaphysical and normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, and critical humanism."6 In respect to these goals the first essay seems to have been mostly successful. While they have little to say about the context of Davos, Bengtson and Rosengren seem to accept, in their "contrastive critique" to my article my major contention that...

Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo­ lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho­ lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his­ tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub­ category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 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. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop­ erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor­ ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John­ son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso­ nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal­ yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo­ ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss parrhesia (literally “free speech”), in the rhetorical theory of Bartholomew Keckermann (Systema rhetoricae, Hanau 1608) with particular attention to its nature, forms, and functions. For Keckermann, parrhesia is not only one of the rhetorical figures related to expressing or amplifying emotions, but also may be considered as a regulative idea of speech best epitomized in the postulate, to speak “everything freely and sincerely,” since the term includes the Greek notion. Aside from such ancient authors as Quintilian, the major source of theoretical inspirations for Keckermann are the textbooks written by Melanchthon (on the relations between parrhesia and flattery), Ramus (on parrhesia as a kind of exclamation) and Sturm (on the critical power of parrhesia). With a firm grounding in this contextual background, this analysis elucidates Keckermann’s contribution to the Renaissance debate on this rhetorical schema.

Erik Bengtson and Mats Rosengren Choices that Matter: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and Contemporary Rhetoric w hen we decided to respond to Thomas A. Discenna's origi­ nal article, "Rhetoric's ghost at Davos: Reading Cassirer in the rhetorical tradition," we had a two-fold purpose.1 2 First, we wanted to support the important claim that Ernst Cassirer can con­ tribute significantly to the contemporary field of rhetorical studies. Second, we wanted to make sure that the coming renaissance for Cassirer's work within rhetorical studies will be based on a solid foun­ dation, that is, on an understanding of Cassirer's work that renders the complexities and qualities of his philosophy. We and Discenna are part­ ners in the first ambition. However, as we argued in "A PhilosophicalAnthropological Case for Cassirer in Rhetoric," Discenna's article did not provide the solid foundation we were hoping to find. Hence, we felt obliged to respond, and do so even more after having read Discenna's reply (in this volume) to our article. On the upside - and for this we want to thank the editors of Rhetorica - the two original articles, as well as the two contributions in this volume, hopefully provide scholars of rhetoric with an incentive to go further and to dig deeper. As strong believers in the heuristic value of pro et contra argumentation, we acknowledge that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is valuable for the continued process of in­ troducing Cassirer in contemporary disciplinary rhetorical debates that the discussion in Rhetorica includes both Discenna's more traditional account - repeating some of the historical critiques against, as well 1Thomas A. Discenna, "Rhetoric's ghost at Davos: Reading Cassirer in the rhe­ torical tradition," Rhetorica 32.3 (2014): 245-266. 2Mats Rosengren och Erik Bengtson, "A Philosophical-Anthropological Case for Cassirer in Rhetoric," Rhetorica 353 (2017): 346-65. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 198-206. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 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.2019.37.2T98 Choices that Matter 199 entrenched understandings of, Cassirer s work — and our alternative account, founded on a contemporary reassessment of the philosophy of symbolic forms. In a nutshell, the reconsideration that we suggest does not repeat the historical criticism of Cassirer that once contributed to putting him in the margins of academic thought, and instead asks if those very traits, formerly seen as flaws, can be seen as strengths. In this article we focus on clarifying our position in relation to two central points of conflict in our discussion with Discenna. Both concern how to understand Cassirer and how to understand rhetoric today. The first issue is the place of language. The second concerns ethics. We would like our article to entice the reader to go directly to Cassirer to understand Cassirer. Iterated statements from secondary sources must - due to the long-standing tradition of misinterpretations of Cassirer's work - be treated with caution. Towards the end of the article we will also respond to Discenna's poetic critique regarding the concept of "thrown-ness." In our view, this critique completely misses the mark as an account of our position. On the Place oe Language Let us start by discussing the place of language within the philoso­ phy of symbolic forms, as well as within contemporary rhetorical theory. In Discenna's reply in this volume, he underscores the "centrality" of language for Cassirer as well as for rhetoric. In the context of that argu­ ment, we must note that the term "central" or "centrality" is ambiguous. It can on the one hand be understood as synonymous with "important" or "crucial." Following that interpretation, the statement that language is "central" to the philosophy of symbolic forms or to rhetoric becomes completely uncontroversial. To position us as opposing that claim would be a straw man argument. The entire first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is...

This article examines a manageable approach that provides students with significant opportunities to write and improve their writing over time in an introductory quantitative business course. The study examines six elements of written communication skills, as evidenced by assessment data from memorandum assignments administered following pedagogical interventions throughout the semester in an operations management course. Results demonstrate that student performance of audience identification, action-oriented request, and punctuation improved. Interestingly, student performance of grammar slightly decreased. A follow-up analysis indicates that some writing mistakes were related to a lack of proofreading. This article also presents original memorandum assignments and suggestions for improvement.

Esperanto was conceived as a model of commercial usefulness, but also to confront the higher aims of its “internal idea.” The interna ideo of Esperanto has historically taken various forms, but it has most often been concerned with protecting a multiethnic world in its diversities, building bridges that allow for a more equitable coexistence of minorities. This underlying ethical thrust makes the international language a potential lever for a more just society in the current global conditions. In order to support this claim, I reconstruct the rhetorical situation of Zamenhof’s pronouncements on the “internal idea,” including Hillelism and Homaranismo. I also argue that George Orwell’s dystopic Newspeak can be considered a political commentary about what would happen to Esperanto if the “internal idea” were to be hijacked in the name of economic progress or the supposed tranquility of commerce.

This assignment demonstrates how writing instructors can cultivate students' mētis, a flexible and adaptive way of thinking, by requiring participation in naturalistic rhetorical situations that arise outside the classroom. The assignment, developed for an undergraduate, mixed-major professional writing course, asks students to pursue external professional opportunities. The affordances of naturalistic situations and the requirements of the assignment work together, enabling students to develop three key features of mētis: vigilance, tricks, and multiplicity. Exercising mētis improves students' chances of success when they pursue opportunities in competitive industries.

O’Connell’s Rhetoric of Seeing joins a growing list of titles interested in restoring performance and visuality to our understanding of ancient Greek culture and, especially, political and legal culture. This work distinguishes itself through its limited focus on the rhetorical function of seeing and visuality in extant forensic speeches. Each chapter addresses a different kind of seeing, often beginning with an overview of the relevant secondary literature, then considering other ancient genres or fields—Plato and Aristotle, poetry or history, medical or rhetorical treatises, and finally examining two or three important or representative examples from legal speeches. O’Connell divides the work into three “kinds” of seeing.First, he looks at what the audience can literally see. Part 1, “Physical Sight,” considers examples of visual bias concerning the physical appearance of litigants or others. This includes familiar arguments from probability (eikos) based on appearance: one need only look at Antigenes to know that he could not have overpowered Pantainetos (Demosthenes 37, Against Pantainetos); a glance at the pensioner’s disability and we can see that the charge of hubris is ridiculous (Lysias 31, For the Disabled Man). It is surprising here that O’Connell does not do more with the visual aspect of eikos arguments, which are said to have begun with Hermes’ infantile appeal to his own youth in his defense speech against Apollo: “Do I look like a cattle driver to you, a burly fellow?” (Hymn to Hermes 265). This is a central and well-trod aspect of ancient rhetorical theory that seems to call out for inclusion and that could have been given a new layer of interpretation through O’Connell’s visual approach. Counter-probability is rare in legal arguments but equally important in the development of rhetorical theory and with similar implications for visual rhetoric. The strong (or young) man who asserts that he would not have assaulted the weak (or old) man because he would be the first suspected depends in part upon similarly visible features of his person (Antiphon 2.2.3; cf. Aristotle 2.24.10–11).The final chapter of Part 1 takes up issues of movement and gesture, with references to gesture in Plato and Aristotle, a brief review of physiognomy, and then a discussion of Aeschines’ widely studied Against Timarkhos. There is brief mention of the rhetorical cannon of delivery or hupokrisis and the recommendations of Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysius and more recent work on categories of gesture by Karsouris and Hughes, but O’Connell does not take up the rhetorical canon of delivery (hupokrisis) in depth. His discussion of delivery faces the same problems that most scholars face: there simply is no good way to talk about it as a general category. Either atomize the body to talk about hands, then faces, then movement, or settle for vague gestural and expressive categories and recommendations: modest and appropriate or excessive and inappropriate. Attending to specific cases and speeches is often more successful. O’Connell’s discussion of Aeschines’ speech Against Timarkhos goes further toward demonstrating his overall thesis than do his general comments.Second, we can observe the language of visuality in the speech itself, when the speaker asks the audience to look at something literally and directly as visual evidence, or figuratively or indirectly through terms of demonstration, display, and witnessing. Part 2, “The Language of Demonstration and Visibility,” looks at terms of seeing in the orations: deiknumi (demonstrate or display) and its variants (apodeixis, epideixis, endeixis, etc.), phaneros and phainomai (visible) and their variants (kataphanēs, apophainō, etc.), and martus (witness) and its variants. Chapter3 considers the language of display and witnessing, where speakers seek to prove their case by describing what has been shown and seen by witnesses, or where they demand witnesses to prove what has been asserted. “How else,” says Antiphon in On the Chorus Boy, “can I make true things trustworthy” except through the consistent affirmation of witnesses who were present? (Antiphon 6.29). This section is valuable for bringing into focus the centrality of visibility and sight to notions of truth, a factor that can easily be lost in translations. Thus, the speaker of On the Chorus Boy emphasizes not only that he was appointed a counselor and entered the council-house as such, but that he was seen (horōntes) and was visible (phaneros) doing so. O’Connell does not claim, but he enables one to conclude, that the infamous dichotomy between truth and probability in rhetorical theory typically devolves into these two kinds of seeing: what has been witnessed (and is therefore true) and what the situation “looks like” to the audience (and must be probable).Included here is a section on medical and philosophical interest in the visible as an epistemological link to the invisible. O’Connell quotes Anaxoagoras’ maxim, “Visible things are the face of things which are unclear” (101). This could lead to a discussion of the complex and rhetorically important doctrine of signs as tools of rhetorical argument. Instead, O’Connell moves on in chapter four to discuss how speakers use the language of visibility and demonstration to describe arguments. This, argues O’Connell, places jurors into the position of virtual witnesses themselves of something publicly known, as it was known that some grain dealers had been changing their prices over the course of a day (Lysias 22, Against the Grain Dealers). Or they are witnesses of arguments as demonstrations (epideixō). Speakers contrast what the opponent simply says (legei) with what the speaker will “demonstrate in an evident manner” (110). The language of display is thus used to differentiate mere telling from showing. This reference to visual metaphors for the persuasive effects of argument suggests a larger connection with rhetorical argument generally and the role of vision therein.Third, we can attend to imagination as internal sight, or what O’Connell calls “shared spectatorship,” when speakers “try to make the jurors visualize their version of events and accept it as true” (123). This includes a discussion of techniques of vivid description like enargeia, hyptyposis, or ekphrasis via detailed description. O’Connell looks specifically at described scenes of civic suffering, as when Lycurgus describes the panic after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea. Shared spectatorship can also occur through the construction of “internal audiences—characters in a narrative who witness what is being described and whose reaction can function as a prompt and model for the jury, as when, in the speech Against Diogeiton (Lysias 32), the speaker recounts Diogeiton’s daughter speaking to the family about her father’s embezzlement and lying (150). Visualization can also be heightened through deictic pointing to the persons in court whose actions or suffering is being described, fusing what is physically seen (demonstratio ad oculo) with what is imagined (deixis ad phantasma): “this man here they seized and tied to the pillar” (Lysias fr. 279, 155). This takes us back to the beginning, which addressed seeing in performance space itself. This last section was for me the most interesting and informative, and it seemed the most widely applicable to forensic, and indeed all genres of oratory. Here too, I saw connections to a basic category of rhetorical discourse: narrative and narrative theory, to notions of realism and verisimilitude, to the conjuring of story worlds and the work of narrative inference.Certainly, anyone interested in visual and spatial rhetorics, bodily rhetoric, performance, and related topics will want to be familiar with O’Connell’s work. I found much to admire in every chapter, and more so as the book advanced to later sections and chapters. At the same time, in each section I found myself thinking about some clear and relevant connections to fundamentals of rhetorical theory—theories of probability and signs, of argument and narrative—that the work brushed up against but did not explore. Of course, O’Connell writes as a classicist, not a rhetorician, and we cannot expect any work to follow up every thread that it pulls on, particularly those outside the author’s bailiwick. So, we might rather say that this work promises to amply repay the attention of scholars of rhetorical history and theory for its insights into the operation of sight and seeing—physical, lexical, and imaginary—in Attic forensic speeches.

This case study is based on a research through design project (RTD) that focuses on a technical communication video of the live-action format. It investigates the usability and design-implications of a live-action how-to video, by means of analyzing user-centered data such as YouTube analytics data, usability, and comprehension assessments. In the study, four key live-action video affordances are identified: verifiability, comparability, recordability, and visibility. The identification of these affordances when related to the users’ assessments resulted in several design implementations that would warrant sought-for communication efficacies. Findings show that some assumed efficacies appear to be mitigated by the complexity and the density of the video information. One implication of this is that the implementation of conventional video editing techniques and the addition of on-screen text that serve to make content briefer and more concise into instructional live-action videos requires the technical communicator’s careful consideration.

This article extends new materialist theorizing on the constructive role played by the physical stuff of the world. Specifically, it draws on Kenneth Burke’s writings on recalcitrance to theorize the materialities of rhetorical invention. It takes X-rays as a case study in recalcitrance-driven invention, focusing on two particular applications, traditional medical X-rays, a pervasive category of contemporary technical communication, and backscatter X-ray airport security scans, a controversial and short-lived one. Its analysis shows how recalcitrance (1) is harnessed as means of technical invention and (2) is key to invention’s bidirectionality, by which our material interventions, in turn, work upon us.

Though it has been insufficiently noticed, Kenneth Burke spoke at the first meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago on March 25, 1950. Archival sources reveal that his remarks—“Rhetoric—Old and New”—drew from his recently completed A Rhetoric of Motives and from another volume, The War of Words, that he intended to publish separately. Burke sought to restore instruction in rhetoric to composition courses, explained his newly developed concept of “identification,” and later saw the published version of his remarks mysteriously missing from the first issue of College Composition and Communication.

Trees have instructed students of writing and rhetoric since long before Aristotle evoked them to illustrate hyle and telos. In recent times, Bruno Latour’s case study of the Amazon forest helped influence rhetoric’s new materialist turn. Trees are also remarkable exemplars of nonhuman communication networks. From the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this article defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.

The release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys is part of a public health initiative to limit the spread of infectious disease. The local debate over this proposed action provides a current case study of a public, scientific controversy in which citizens and officials disagree about what is best for the community. The case study challenges technical writing students to consider complex cultural circuits, or networks, that comprise a specific controversy. The students analyze the rhetorical situation, create new content that contributes to the ongoing discussion, and learn about audience through usability testing their multimodal projects.