With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing—particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts—have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this article, we propose a pedagogy that views multimodal composition as advocacy. Because all texts are embedded with advocacy, encouraging students to recognize their own advocacy practices, and teaching them to carefully approach how they construct texts, we argue, may better prepare our students to be more social-justice minded public writers and rhetors in the future.

This multimedia article focuses on my experience as a professor working on a campus adjacent to Ferguson, Missouri. I discuss the ways that Ferguson and Black Lives Matter pushed me to intentionally and meaningfully connect my teaching, research, and the local community. Through narrative, video and audio excerpts and analysis of conversations with Ferguson community members, and pedagogical reflection, I argue for an understanding of public rhetoric and writing that is more inclusive of listening, archives, collectivity, and social justice. I also highlight the importance of building rhetorical theory alongside public rhetors in local communities, helping students understand that the rhetorical tradition is far from a historical relic. Instead, it is a work-in-progress, living and breathing all around them.

In this interview, Paula Mathieu explores the rhetorical tactics and contemplative practices necessary to cultivate hope in a period of political tumult. Drawing on her scholarship on the “public turn” in Composition Studies, a term she gave us in her vital Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition , Mathieu discusses tactics and strategies for teaching public writing and supporting the work of public writing teachers at a time when community partnerships and service learning are more susceptible to critique in political discourse. Mathieu traces out a synthesis between mindfulness and public engagement and underlines the importance of seeing the contemplative as productive and reflective of public engagement.

In this interview, Susan Wells discusses the teaching of public writing and the work of public rhetoric as they respond to both shifting and recurring political and social contexts. Drawing on insights from her extensive and current work on public rhetoric, including her foundational essay “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?,” Wells discusses the possibilities public writing instruction holds for cultivating students’ public agency, while also exploring the boundaries between what can and cannot be accomplished in the public writing classroom.

Abstract Scholars have repeatedly argued that Harry Truman’s decision to create the President’s Committee on Civil Rights would ultimately influence civil rights in the United States for many years afterward. However, scholars have been less clear in explaining what led Truman to act on civil rights in the first place. One important factor in the Truman administration’s creation of the committee that is often mentioned but almost never given as much attention as it deserves is the 1946 Georgia Lynching. Through a reception study of the articles, congressional debates, editorials, and speeches that responded to the murders, this essay argues that the murders of four African Americans in a small, rural town were transformed into a national focusing event because of how several key interpretive decisions emerged from the basic facts of the lynching in conjunction with larger cultural concerns. This analysis both highlights how the mass lynching came to have cultural significance and argues for the importance of rhetorical scholarship that engages the role of focusing events in both public debate and policy creation.

Abstract This essay argues against the prevailing historical conception that George Strock’s graphic photograph of three lifeless Marines—published by Life magazine on September 20, 1943—was the definitive point when domestic U.S. propaganda began to portray increasingly grisly images of dead American soldiers. After considering how the visual culture of the home front made the photo’s publication a dubious prospect for the government, I examine a series of predecessor images that arguably helped construct a rhetorical space in which such graphic depictions could gradually gain public acceptance and that, ultimately, ushered in a transformation of the home front’s visual culture.

Abstract Jacques Rancière defines literarity as texts' propensity to be used in unexpected ways by unforeseen readers. Unlike scholars who view literarity as having intrinsically democratic implications, I contend that Rancière offers a more ambivalent account of its significance. I illustrate my argument by analyzing the aftermath of suffragists' appeal to the U.S. Constitution in the 1870s. I show that public agitation over textual meaning can shore up the perception that a text is indeterminate and allows debate, but it can be cited as well as a symptom of incompetence and duplicity, as evidence that texts should be reserved for those with mastery. Using a text democratically, then, involves more than advocating for innovative interpretations. It also involves struggling for the propriety of treating the meaning of a text as a matter of democratic interaction, against those who treat it as not subject to public debate.

Book Review| November 01 2016 Review: Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, edited by Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, and Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, by Raffaella Cribiore Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, eds., Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, Oxford, 2013. 420 + x pp. ISBN: 9780199654314Raffaella Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, Ithaca: Cornell, 2013. 260 + x pp. ISBN: 9780801452079 Jeffrey Walker Jeffrey Walker Jeffrey Walker Dept. of Rhetoric & Writing University of Texas at Austin Mailstop B5500 Austin, Texas 78712 USA JSWalker@austin.utexas.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (4): 460–465. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.460 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jeffrey Walker; Review: Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, edited by Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, and Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, by Raffaella Cribiore. Rhetorica 1 November 2016; 34 (4): 460–465. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.4.460 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 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.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review of Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse by editors Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy.

Recent research suggests that climate change is a “tribal” issue. That is, some audiences deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change because of their group identities, not because they misunderstand the science. In this essay, I offer a case study of two Christian climate science communicators and their efforts to persuade religious and conservative audiences who are skeptical of the need to respond to climate change. I analyze three of their rhetorical moves that may be of interest to those who teach and practice public rhetoric. As I analyze these moves, I consider both their persuasive potential and tradeoffs.

Review of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere by Robert Cox and Phaedra Pezzullo.

Reviews 465 In chapters 3 and 4 Cribiore works through the question(s) of Libanius' opinions of paganism and Christianity in his letters and speeches, showing convincingly that Libanius held a moderate cultural-conservative position that enabled him to genuinely be friends with Christians as well as pagans — which, after all, one would expect from a rhetorician who grasps the value of argumentum in utranique parton not only as a method of debate but also as a way of life, an ethic for a civilized, humane society. Despite these criticisms I do in fact like this book. I particularly like its refutation of the Gibbonesque judgment on Libanius, and its portrait of rhetoric in late antiquity as very much still alive and doing practical civic as well as cultural work (see in particular p. 36). In a sense this book is a sort of appendix to The School of Libanius, which I think remains the most impor­ tant of Cribiore's books for rhetoricians and historians of rhetoric. Different readers of this journal will want to read both Libanius the Sophist and Hellenistic Oratory for different reasons, and your responses likely will differ from mine, depending on your scholarly interests and orientation. Bottom line, these books give us a closer, better description of rhetoric in the Hellenistic age and late antiquity, and belong on the rhetorician's bookshelf. Jeffrey Walker, University of Texas at Austin Valiavitcharska, Vessela. Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 243 pp. ISBN: 9781107273511 Midway through the introduction to Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium, Vessela Valiavitcharska sets forth the book's aim, which is to "make a step toward contributing to" an understanding of "the argumentative and emo­ tional effects of discourse, and of the mental habits involved in its produc­ tion" (p. 12). That professed goal, enfolded in prepositions and couched in the incremental language of a step—and a single step at that—is modest. And while the framing of the book, and for that matter, Valiavitcharska her­ self, exude modesty, the rigor, disciplinary reach, and sheer brilliance of her study calls for less modest account. That is where I come in. In addition to its intrinsic value of reclaiming the Old Church Slavic homily tradition for rhetorical study, Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium joins at least three rising trends in rhetorical studies. The first two are burgeoning interests in 1) Byzantine rhetoric and 2) the recovery of pre-modern class­ room practices. Thomas Conley and Jeffrey Walker have both pointed out the importance of Byzantine rhetoric and have done much to dismantle assumptions that this period presents merely a redaction of classical texts and teaching. Scholars in the U.S. (David Fleming, Raffaella Cribiore, Marjo­ rie Curry Woods, Martin Camargo) and Europe (Manfred Kraus, Ruth Webb, 466 RHETORICA María Violeta Pérez Custodio) have revived an interest in the progymnasmata and have developed new methods for identifying and extrapolating class­ room practices from extant artifacts. Valiavitcharska both makes use of those methods and extends them. These two contexts together mean that there ought to be a broad, interdisciplinary readership for Rhythm and Rhetoric in Byzantium. But there is still a third exciting context for this work, one that extends its reach past classical scholars and historians of rhetoric and to scholars concerned with sensory dimensions of rhetoric, specifically those facilitating rhetoric's sonic turn. Scholarship in rhetoric, communication, and commu­ nications have very recently seen an uptick in interest in how sound shapes thought, interaction, messages, and sociality. Scholars such as Gregory Goodale, Matthew Jordan, Joshua Gunn, Richard Graff, and Jonathan Sterne are leading the way here. This work, partly a response to what rhetoric scholar Sidney Dobrin (following Donna Haraway) calls the "tyranny of the visual," is cutting edge. Some of it is historical, but (with the important exception of Graff) the history is usually limited to the twentieth century, mainly because of its focus on sound-recording technologies, which are rela­ tively recent. Valiavitcharska's work promises to turn the heads of these scholars and their followers, to reveal to them the intricate and longstanding root system of sonic rhetoric, and to stretch...

460 RHETORICA readings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century works. The book is also an excellent jumping-off point for future research, and Acheson s spe­ cific insights relating to the four particular modes of brainwork the book deals with and the work's broader project of finding productive crossmodal correspondences will certainly be productive for many working in the Renaissance. Chris Dearner, University of California, Irvine Christos Kremmydas and Kathryn Tempest, eds., Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity & Change, Oxford, 2013. 420 + x pp. ISBN: 9780199654314 Raffaella Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century, Ithaca: Cornell, 2013. 260 + x pp. ISBN: 9780801452079 Recently I was looking at an early 15th-cenury manuscript copy of a 14th-century Greek "synopsis of rhetoric" in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Christian Walz, in the preface to his 1832 edition of this text, says that he has not seen the Vienna manuscript, but cites an 18th century scholar who cites a 17th century scholar who has (Walz vol. 3, pp. 465-466). It occurred to me that I might have been the first person since the 17th century to actually open the Vienna manuscript and read it. True or false, there's a certain roman­ ticism in such experience, and a certain pleasure: the intrepid academic, decoder of texts, historian and rhetorician, paddles alone upriver past ruins and jungles, armed with machete, flashlight, and a pencil sharpener, into the world that time forgot. Heureka; I havefound it; houtos ekeinos; this is that. Thus I am happy with both books on review here. Both offer new per­ spective^) on an insufficiently studied part of rhetoric's ancient history— four fifths of it, in fact: the roughly eight centuries from the Hellenistic age to the end of the ancient world. Both books, moreover, offer a case wellgrounded in the available evidence and delivered in a (mostly) clear, accessi­ ble style. In short they have many virtues, and are a pleasure to read. Let's paddle upriver a little way. I'll start with Kremmydas and Tempest. i. Hellenistic Oratory and the Myth of Decline At stake throughout this volume is the pervasive myth that rhetoric, or more precisely oratory (rhetoric-al performance), "declined" in the Hellenistic age, the period conventionally dated from the death of Alexander (in 322 BCE) to the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium by the soon-to-be emperor Augustus (in 31 BCE). The myth presumes that Reviews 461 rhetoric is the art of practical civic discourse embodied in the speeches of the foui th-centui y Attic Orators, especially Demosthenes, and that it flouris­ hes in democratic polities and languishes under autocratic rule. There are no preserved examples of Hellenistic oratory, which prompts an inference that little or nothing worth preserving was produced. Rhetoric (says the myth) had lost its civic role and was reduced to "merely" epideictic and literary functions for most of the next three centuries. Elsewhere I have argued against the "decline" story, mostly on probabi­ listic and definitional grounds (Rhetoric & Poetics in Antiquity, Oxford 2000, ch. 3). One can make epideictic/panegyric discourse the paradigmatic ("cen­ tral," "primary") form of rhetoric, as do Chaim Perelman and Kenneth Burke, in which case "rhetoric" seems to have enjoyed a great flourishing in the Hellenistic age. But even if we define rhetoric as the art of the Attic Orators, the fact is that it continued to play an important civic role. Law-courts contin­ ued to be busy, city councils continued to meet, kings and governors engaged in deliberative discourse with their advisors (if they were wise), inter-city diplomacy involved embassies and large amounts of written correspondence and chanceries to manage it, and so on. The needs of empire created jobs in the imperial bureaucracv, for which a rhetorical education was required, and there were municipallv sponsored ("public") as well as independent ("private") schools to serve the need in cities large and small, as can he seen in the papyrus fragments of boys' rhetorical exercises found at Oxyrhynchus and other prov incial towns in Hellenistic Egypt. Schools of rhetoric multi­ plied and throve. There were significant advances too in rhetorical theory...

In a demanding engagement, James L. Kastely offers an exquisite reading, even revision, of the Republic, and through nuanced attention to form, absences, and tangents he begins to answer a methodological question that I have had for a while (Lyon). The Gorgias ends with a failed elenchus, when no one will continue, and then in a methodological shift after the Republic’s first chapter, Plato makes explicit his dissatisfaction with elenchus. Rather than ignore what seemingly stopped Plato twice, Professor Kastely explicates a new, more dialogical method by reading the Republic as rhetorical theory (x, xii). The new method and theory are performed in answering the question of whether it possible to have a political discourse that is not simply a displaced pursuit of private interest (3). Through meticulous reading, Kastely explicates Plato’s rhetorical method from the movement between the performative, mimetic Republic, which concedes the multitude, and the ideal, contemplative Kallipolis, which unifies everything, even gender.Between the two, Kastely locates Platonic persuasion: “Persuasion … can be extended and deepened to being understood as the opportunity and responsibility to shape one’s identity. Persuasion now can be understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220).Constituting persuasion does not manipulate the other, but works to change desire and the internal constitution of the individual. That is, this persuasion remakes desires, values, and identities (Frankenstein’s operation). Kastely considers reconstitution as dialogic and participatory and thus better than manipulative, orator-centric persuasion in that re-constitutive persuasion alters and expands “our understanding of what constitutes political discourse” to include foundational values (10–11). Intriguing as this is, I need further evidence for the dialogic nature of constituting persuasion, particularly because it is not achieved through deliberation, but through erasing alternative desires. Given Socrates’ discursive control, belief in Plato’s commitment to dialogue remains difficult, and when I consider the two states together, the Republic and Kallipolis, I instead find that the new method arises through doubleness, a double logos that destabilizes wisdom and sends a frustrated, skeptical reader questing. I offer two examples of Plato’s unresolvable doubleness.In addition to passive spectators, Kastely notes “the creators of discourse” and “the audiences who can listen to or read that discourse with a critical awareness” (xiii). He then develops a theory of cultural criticism for the non-philosopher, but the hierarchy of the philosopher and non-philosopher creates a doubleness, demanding critique from Plato’s critical readers. Even critical readers are not creators of discourse (rhetoricians?): readers do not represent their desires or create discourse, nor do they constitute their own identity or the state’s. Perhaps Kastely finds evidence for Plato’s constitution of “an audience who can rethink its cultural heritage” (80), but would truly critical readers accept the privilege of philosophers who deny their ability to create? The binary of reading and creating seemingly would frustrate truly critical readers. Would they not desire to create?Another doubleness: If mimesis is banned from the ideal state of Kallipolis, then what is its place in the performance of the state of Republic? Kastely writes mimesis into the state, reading The Republic as epic poetry, and hence he reads the dialogic state of Republic in relationship and preference to the monologic Kallipolis. Yet critical ironies abound in the tension between the imagined Kallipolis and the narrated, multifaceted state of Republic. Let me quickly, and perhaps fairly, trace Kastely’s argument for mimesis. He sees Plato’s difficulty with imitative poetry as an interpretive tension between mimetic entertainment and rhetorical, critical reading, writing “(t)o read the Republic rhetorically requires a reader to go beyond the surface and to understand the issues that the surface text both represents and distorts” (112). Ignoring the critique of poetry as counterfeit reality, Kastely argues that the right kind of reading leads to philosophical truth. Mimesis works pedagogically: in the Republic, “the rhetorical action of the dialogue” is “an enactment of persuasion that provides guidance on how to use poetry rhetorically to effect practical and individual change” (62). That is, the audience should read the Republic’s mimesis as an enactment of persuasive technique, not as drama, for Plato would “undo or minimize” cultural influences by acknowledging the rhetoricity of all discourse (79, 101). In Kastely’s epic Republic, readers engage the dialogue’s narrative, and it “educate(s) them on how to interrogate works of cultural rhetoric” (62). Readers thus become suspicious of the forces shaping their souls, moving away from shared culture toward self-cultivation. But do rhetorical reading and self-cultivation save mimesis? Do they respond to or change common culture? Can’t self-cultivation remove a citizen from common concerns and the polity? Is rhetorical reading the controlled action by which critical readers are separated from the creators of discourse? Doesn’t reception differ from production?Kastely appreciates Plato’s desire for a skeptical reader, and his rhetorical reader is a provocative concept, but he tends to interpret the Republic through dialogic resolution and logical consistency. Might I suggest that Plato is sometimes better read sophistically through contradiction, paradox, and bivalence? In doubleness, Plato violates his own dictates. For example, Socrates defends true philosophers through a tale of low, counterfeit reality. He tells the silly tale of a blind, deaf, and ignorant ship owner faced with sailors wrangling to be captain (488). Seeking the job, the argumentative sailors deny any need for knowledge of sailing. Consequently a false definition—captain as a windbag—emerges. Plato calls this analogy, compiled “out of lots of different elements, like the goat-stags and other compound creatures painters come up with” (488a). Analogy perhaps, but also narrative, full of bad behaviors (including murder), an extreme counterfeit reality: in offering such a tale, Plato assumes his audience is already able to critique mimesis, avoid categorical mistakes, and modulate their identifications with bad characters. He assumes that the dialogic pedagogy has worked or is unnecessary, and perhaps he tests our skeptical ability to read goat-stag extremes.Kastely’s systemic reading of the entire Republic brilliantly draws attention to Plato’s performative method, revitalizing and embodying Platonic rhetoric, but it understates Plato’s doubleness, playfulness, puzzlement, and skepticism. Plato, with his longing for total revolution and his fractured fairy tales, is the writerly critic of writing; the dramatic censor of plot, setting, and character; and the myth-teller who denounces mimesis. Given Plato’s denials and dissatisfactions, his doubleness, tensions, and contradictions, Kastely rightly reads him for performance and rhetoricity and wisely confronts the two states, Kallipolis and Republic. Without a doubt, this book begins another millennium of Platonic delight.

I am grateful to Arthur Walzer and Heather Hayes for arranging the opportunity for three scholars to respond to my book, and to Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda for their responses.Because he so thoroughly disagrees with my argument, Professor Krajewski offers me a helpful place to begin to clarify that argument. He argues that, whatever the intent of my argument, my reading of the Republic relies on the presumption that rhetoric is subservient to philosophy. My concern, however, is not with some hierarchical arrangement but with addressing questions essential for the theoretical grounding of rhetoric. Because these questions do not admit of empirical or fixed answers, they are the kinds of questions that the rhetorical theorist Michel Meyer characterizes as philosophic (74).Professor Krajewski is troubled by Plato’s unfair characterization of the sophists. No one can argue that Plato’s representation of the sophists is friendly, but I would argue that it is more nuanced than a simple dismissal of them as corrupt. More to the point, corruption is really not the complaint that Socrates brings against the sophists in the Republic. Indeed, he explicitly defends them against the charge of corruption and criticizes them, instead, for confirming rather than challenging the city’s views on justice.For Professor Krajewski, Socrates’s various depictions of the audience show contempt for interlocutors and readers, characterizing them as children, sheep, and worse. But Plato’s critique of the public is grounded on the assumption that we do not know who we are. This lack of self-knowledge is not one that divides elites and masses but is a condition of the entire human race. For Plato, the philosophical issue that necessitates his dialogue arises because the citizens of Athens are justified in what they believe, responsible in the way that they hold those beliefs, and, despite that, they are in deep self-contradiction. Glaucon argues that Socrates is simply the latest in a long line of apologists for justice who perpetuate a public discourse in which no one believes. This discourse has led unintentionally to a corrosive situation in which no one believes that he or she really desires to be just. Glaucon’s request, in which he is joined by his brother Adeimantus, is for a new form of discourse that has the potential to be genuinely persuasive—they seek from philosophy a rhetoric that can honor and address the concerns of the average citizen.Professor Krajewski raises the important issue of the relationship between ruler and ruled. To understand this relationship, it is important to realize that for Socrates this is an issue of persuasion and not of legislation. The rule that occupies Socrates is effected through public discourse; hence the request for a discourse that can genuinely speak to what the public believes. Glaucon does not seek advice on how to govern the citizens but on how to speak to them. The goal is not compulsion but persuasion.In pointing to the methodological role of doubleness in the Republic, Professor Lyon zeroes in on an important aspect of the dialogue, and she makes me wish that I had given more explicit attention to it. Although she admires my approach to the Republic, neither I nor Plato has convinced her fully that the goal of reconstituting a democratic citizenry can be accomplished through an act of persuasion. At issue is the way in which the audience participates in this reconstitution. Professor Lyon advocates for a process of deliberation, for such a process would invite active rather than passive spectators. She is uneasy with what seems to be a passive role for the spectator or reader of the Republic. I think that her insight into the doubleness of the dialogue provides a way of addressing her concerns.If part of the rhetorical effort of the dialogue is not simply to provide an intellectual defense of justice but to alter the way that its readers desire, so that they genuinely desire to be just, how can a text achieve that end? Professor Lyon argues that Plato attempts to achieve that end “through erasing alternative desires.” I don’t see any effort to erase desire. What I see is a text that is attempting, as a text, to transform desire, and I see it doing this through recourse to a doubleness that produces a dissonance, which, in turn, opens up justice as an object of desire. To suggest how this happens, I turn to Anne Carson’s account of the tension at the heart of the erotic experience. Although she does not use the term doubleness to characterize erotic engagement, that is what her account suggests. For her the moment of desire is when the actual and the ideal are brought into a proximity that both offers the hope of a new identity at the same time that it reminds one, painfully, that that identity is, in fact, not the case (17, 36, 69). The dissonance between the ideal and the actual fosters desire. Such a dissonance is at the heart of the Republic, as the Kallipolis as an impossible ideal is brought into continual contact with a reality to which Socrates and his interlocutors seek to be adequate. Out of that tension a desire for justice is born.Professor Svoboda and I agree that there are strong reasons to read Plato’s Republic, not as an anti-democratic text, but as a more complex response to a set of historical events that both created a series of crises for Athens and that led to the establishment of its democratic constitution. He rightly notes that Plato’s text makes deliberate allusions to those events, and that its opening book, in particular, engages those events and would be so viewed by fourth-century Athenian readers. I agree fully. Further, I agree with his argument that Plato’s philosophy is best understood as a “situated practice responding to particular problems.” Such a perspective supports a reading of philosophy as a particular kind of effort to engage responsibly the events that provoke critical reflection. It recovers a purposiveness for philosophy and makes clear that philosophy is inextricably joined with rhetoric.The point whose force I felt the most was Professor Svoboda’s reminder that the peace achieved in Athens after the Peloponnesian wars was attained only by an agreement of both sides “to forget injustices that had been done to them during the civil conflict.” This is a sound historical point and, as Professor Svoboda notes, this agreement turns the “Republic’s common sense understanding of justice on its head.” He goes on to make an important point: that it precisely the dissonance between Plato’s account of justice and Athens’ important pragmatic response to those serious injustices that marked civil strife at the end of the fifth century BCE that helps us understand the possible philosophical motivation behind the Republic. In offering an account of justice and making clear that such an account requires an extended philosophical justification, Plato is challenging his readers and confronting the costs hidden in the agreement that had succeeded in establishing peace. The question becomes: how to develop a complex understanding of the problem of justice sufficient to the world as it is and that provides a genuine reason to be just? It is this type of question that is at the heart of a philosophical rhetoric as a discourse essential to the psychological health of individuals and the overall health of the commonwealth.It is my hope that we have begun a discussion that relocates what I take to be an old, tired opposition and recasts it as a theoretically more compelling inquiry into the importance of rhetoric for values that are foundational to our culture and that shape us as creatures of language who participate in those cultures.

Abstract When, on 4 July 2014, the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, preached in the venerable mosque of Mosul the restoration of the caliphate, his homily ushered in far more than a new phase in jihadist warfare against Western values. His oratory launched on the world scene a new culture that instantly began to shape, solidify, and even sublimate the caliphate as the most arresting rhetorical performance of radical and militant Islam. However, despite this self-proclamation, political commentators failed to accurately size up the emerging culture of the new caliphate, and we find ourselves faced now with an alternative, global culture that draws irresistibly more and more converts and partisans into its orbit. The most perilous form of underestimating adversaries is to reduce their cultural complexity to a few, unreflective clichés, a telling sign of our own cultural illiteracy.

AbstractFoundational theories of the public sphere prioritize civic speech while distrusting forms of visuality. As a corrective to this model of the public sphere, rhetorical theorists have recently emphasized visuality as a constitutive mode of contemporary public culture, but they nevertheless tend to prioritize the civic actor over the civic spectator. A productive alternative would begin to distinguish an emerging shift from “deliberative publicity” to “photographic publicity.” The bourgeois public sphere innovated verbal communicative practices that produced a specifically deliberative publicity, enabling one resolution to the core political problems of an earlier (feudal) era. Likewise, contemporary publics utilize emerging digital technologies to produce a specifically photographic publicity, allowing them to address fundamental limitations of the bourgeois public sphere. Photographic publicity helps us rethink the problem of the public sphere in terms of theatricality and civic spectatorship.

Situated learning theory postulates that the environment in which learning occurs is foundational to understanding the outcomes of that learning. Taking classes in a nontraditional classroom, therefore, might have a noticeable effect on learning outcomes. This study examines three structures of the same general education course to understand the potential impact of mediated learning on students’ public speaking and writing apprehension and self-efficacy. Although situated learning theory suggests that the three structures (face-to-face, partially face-to-face, and fully online) should demonstrate differences, the results of this study are mixed, suggesting a complicated picture for situated learning’s ability to speak to differences based on technology use while highlighting the differences in how such technology might affect oral skills versus written skills. The application of situated learning principles to technologically mediated courses demonstrates the need to consider the interplay between environment and content.

Advances in digital media have made an impact on traditional rhetorical culture, thus shifting expectations and norms associated with orality and public presentation. Technology, entertainment, and design (TED) talks represent a new genre of presentation characteristic of Jamieson’s notion of electronic eloquence in that presenters weave together an engaging narrative complete with a strong visual presence. This study applies Bandura’s social cognitive learning theory to explore how students make sense of TED talks. Students responded to two questionnaires in two different classes: a basic public speaking course and a technical communication course. The results suggest that students learn vicariously through viewing mediated presentations, thus shaping their view of public speaking as a coproduced, networked, and engaging narrative. The authors offer recommendations for communication practitioners related to electronic eloquence and the rhetorical tradition.

Abstract In the decades after the Civil War, countless Americans saw the bloody conflict as some kind of message from God. These perceptions created a problem for the preeminent Republican orator of the day, Robert Ingersoll, who was also a fierce opponent of revealed religion. In speaking for the Republican Party during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, Ingersoll managed to interact successfully with religiously structured memories of the war while maintaining his reputation as the Great Agnostic. This essay explores how he was able to do so. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s work on the rhetoric of religion, I argue that Ingersoll interacted with Civil War memory by redirecting supernatural terms to natural and sociopolitical contexts. In so doing he imbued political culture with a sacred character that allowed believers, nonbelievers, and people of various persuasions to participate in memories of the war. In the end, Ingersoll’s oratory modeled a “pluralistic civil religion,” which employs religious language for civic ends but eschews references to the divine as a way of accommodating a range of beliefs.

Geocomposition engages students in writing on the move in order to explore how such writing composes the multiple layers of public places. This article describes a collaborative, location-based composition project designed for students to rhetorically engage a responsive public through locative media: media that work in and through specific sites. View a brief video abstract: Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy

As we enter an era of so-called Do it Yourself health, “patient agency” has become a dominant theme in public discourses of health and medicine. Despite increased salience, patient agency remains a vague term that is capable of being operationalized and moralized in ways that escape attention. To illustrate this, I chart common rhetorical configurations of patient agency in public discourses of health and medicine, and in doing so find that patient agency is commonly rhetoricized as one of three overlapping patient capacities: the capacity to know, the capacity to prevent, and the capacity to decide. Ultimately, I argue that these three rhetorics of patient agency can be deployed to cultivate health subjectivities imbued with untenable ideals of individual control that constrain, rather than open, patients’ rhetorical choices.

In this article I describe a type of hyperbole which does not add certainty to a technical claim by removing qualifiers and hedges to make boring science exciting. Rather, paralogical hyperbole overstates while jumping from one line of reasoning to another. For example, citing technical science to argue publicly that the “missing link” has been found is exaggerative, and in a direction illogical, given its starting premise, born of a technical sphere, which actually identifies “missing links” as indefensible claims. From an analysis of the popularization efforts of a few scientists regarding Darwinius Marsillae, a fossilized lemur-like skeleton first described in the technical scientific journal PLoS ONE, I show that paralogical hyperbole can result in discourses that are unnecessarily polarizing regarding scientifically-opposed publics, and can pose threats to broader public understandings of science. I close with a discussion of the rhetorical practices of dissoi logoi and prolepsis as means by which to more consciously experience and represent scientific rhetorics characterized by parlogical hyperbole.

Abstract Jürgen Habermas supports his transhistorical conception of violence as a form of instrumental reason to be rejected from the ideal polity with a historical narrative that recounts the rejection of Machiavellian and Hobbesian instrumental violence by the Enlightenment philosophes. This article provides a revised narrative, which emphasizes the persistence of a rhetorical conception of violence from Machiavelli's princely violence to a line of Anglo-American republican thinkers who shifted the locus of sovereign rhetorical violence to the people's armed militia. The narrative culminates with Madison's exegesis of the Second Amendment and sketches how this Madisonian conception harmonizes with Habermasian norms and law.

In the latest Oxford World Classic edition of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2015), a painting of the beautiful adorns the cover. The slope of the neck, the curve of the back, it focuses on the form of the beautiful in performance. Seven years earlier, in 2008, the same book, in the same series, imaged the sublime on its cover. Snow falls on pines, the rocks of mountaintops loom in the background; it is meant to evoke the power of the dynamic sublime. Nathan Crick’s challenging new book, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece, completes a similar transition in classical scholarship by moving aesthetic theories of historiography from the rupture of the sublime, like the history of Victor Vitanza, to the forms of the beautiful, like those that support the history of John Poulakos. Crick does aesthetic through a series of close readings of archaic and classical Greek literary, philosophic, and traditionally rhetorical texts ranging from works by Homer to Aristotle. In these readings, he looks not to philology but rather constructs a history of how these texts key to contemporary definitions of power, rhetoric, and politics. It is thus a conceptual history that, in the end, seeks to persuade us that “the faith of rhetoric is that through the power of speech we can recognize our interdependence in a contingent world and seek, together, to constitute a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226).As with most modernist conceptions of the beautiful, like those in Schiller, Crick’s is one that founds itself on the essentialism of both the text and the properties of humanity. Rhetoric and Power begins its first chapter with a reading of Homer that demonstrates how an oral culture creates a virtue that is always bound with divinity. The wandering minstrel has power; he alone gets to stand before the people and remind them how heroes act. In chapter two, Crick considers how the rise of a literate culture influences history. He focuses especially on Heraclitus’s we “can’t stop in the same river twice,” which he reads as containing within it, because of the form of the aphorism, the power to “wake up” individuals to the wisdom of a contingent, as distinguished from a divine, world. Tragedy in Aeschylus, because of the nature of hubris, converges the oral virtue of the Homeric world with the aphoristic insistence that reason cannot rest on divinity. It is in this convergence that rhetoric is first manifest “as a medium by which power is challenged, destroyed, created, and transformed” (60). Protagoras, in chapter four, snatches the scales of justice and the right of retribution from the gods and delivers them to humans, for Protagoras’s words were able to “articulate a political framework … that gave rational justification for putting … multiple perspectives into meaningful communication with each other in order to collectively measure the affairs of the polis” (65). Gorgias’s logical structure takes up chapter five, where his demonstration of all possible causes contains within itself the possibility to break and create anew different orders in symbolic chains of meaning. The history of Thucydides shows justice as “a consequence of power relationships” (155, emphasis in the original), which requires us to contemplate the good action of the present as part of the drama of history. In chapter seven, Aristophanes’s Old Comedy essentializes humans as fallible; Crick concludes, “We are comic creatures precisely because we are always striving to be something greater than what we are” (140); in so doing, Aristophanes allows humans to forgive the error of leaders who incorrectly judge the drama of history. Plato’s dialectic performs “tragicomedy” within his Protagoras, in Crick’s chapter eight, which introduced a “new relationship between rhetoric and power” (168), as the form that allows individuals to turn to the masses and question whether their actions truly conform to “the beautiful state” (162). In chapter nine, Crick credits Isocrates and writing with embedding rhetoric through the human world. Aristotle, then, in the last close reading of the book, contains within his canon the “means by which the competing ends of power and of truth are reconciled through the progressive constitution of the good life” (214).Because it is a history that emphasizes the beautiful, Crick’s history predictably excises violence from power and therefore from rhetoric. This pacification of right communication begins in the introduction, where Crick uses Prometheus Bound to justify an Arendtian separation of violence and power. Violence is an instrument for manipulating material toward an end; power is the capacity for humans to act in concert and “witness a beginning” (91). Rhetoric, then, is the “facilitator” and “medium” of this beneficent power. Rhetoric is, on Crick’s reading, “the artistry of power” and can either be a force for social collectivity or the means for division and conflict. Crick supports this claim with a quotation from the “Chorus to Prometheus” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “So why lavish all your gifts on humans when you can’t take prudent care of yourself? Once you’ve shucked off these bonds I think you’ll be no less powerful than overweening Zeus” (5). As Prometheus is chained to the Caucuses at this time, Crick notes that the only power the chorus could speak of at this moment is the power of speech. This interpretation ignores the fact that Prometheus would first need to “shuck off” the chains. In his discussion of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Crick rejects readings that see Gorgias as criticizing those who would take Helen by force; on Crick’s reading, Gorgias’s targets are “Homeric poets” and their “barbaric violence” (83). In Aristophanes’s Birds, the violence of Pisthetairos’ consuming the “jailbirds” is not power or rhetoric, but force, as the eating is an instrument to preserve continued rule. In fact, for Crick, the scene demonstrates the impossibility of rhetoric to act as a preservation of rule in an oral culture.Crick’s interpretive devotion to the split between power and violence leads to a rather odd moment in his discussion of Isocrates. Because Nicocles was penned rather than spoken, it can perform the function of “power maintenance”; the oral rule of Pisthetairos could not because it can institute a “social contract.” Unlike under Hobbes’s contract, the ruled receive not a freedom from violence, but rather the identification of their place in the hierarchy of virtue. In contradistinction to democracy, which allows the “best to pass unnoticed,” monarchy raises to higher levels those “whose habits and accomplishments can act as exemplars for the rest of the people” (189) because it allows the hegemon to keep detailed written records of all of the ruled. In this way, the ruler is able to prevent revolutions and arrange the people based on their adherence to codified law. In Evagoras, “the goal remains the establishment of a system of perfect surveillance” (188). This surveillance, though, is not violent, as it is in Hobbes. Instead, it “becomes a means of collective regulation in order to form a stable society in harmony with the hegemonic Logos” (190). This contract, however, is not without the threat of violence. Even Crick notes, “Nicocles would have inherited the proto-police system of which the people would have been all too familiar, making [Isocrates’s] suggestion that his thoughts (and eyes) would be present in their deliberations quite literal” (180). How this is not violent is lost on the reader, particularly when Crick quotes again from Nicocles a passage that is a statement of at least symbolic violence, “[d]o not keep silent if you see any who are disloyal to my rule, but expose them; and believe that those who aid in concealing crime deserve the same punishment as those who commit it” (190). Yet, Crick still maintains that there is a split between violence and power here. It is because of this split that Crick is able, in an offhand comment, to dismiss the claim of Victor Vitanza that Isocrates’s system of rhetoric, power, and politics is inherently fascist.Because Isocrates’s system is not violence perpetrated by the state, but instead merely a ranking of citizens from most to least virtuous, the surveillance system of Isocrates can be used by both the ruled and the ruler. We see this again in the conclusion, when Crick, echoing the call from Kalbfleisch’s 2013 article in Advances, claims that historians of rhetoric need to “fully comprehend how the development of print, radio, photography, the telegraph, the press, the telephone, the movie, the computer, and the revolution in communication technologies” (224) changes how the “universal” forms of rhetoric manifest. This is requisite for Crick because without it we will not be able to adequately conceptualize the ways new contingent articulations of people acting in concert can articulate themselves closer to the Platonic three: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Trying to look for a rhetoric that is not one of the “universal” is, according to Crick, exchanging history for propaganda. Some might object to this claim, valuable as it is in its appropriate context, given that often in the Arendtian conception of power, “people acting in concert” includes only those whom the state would qualify as people. It was certainly a political reality at the time, as Crick notes in his introduction, that not everyone counted as human and there was nothing they could do to gain more worth in the hierarchy of the state.Despite my reservations, as an aesthetic reading of rhetoric’s history and the role rhetoric played in human emancipation from the divine, Rhetoric and Power is imaginative and original. If I were to adopt it for teaching, I would put this work with Poulakos and Haskins, juxtaposed against Grimaldi, Gross, Schiappa and Graff. Certainly the work contributes well to the ongoing debate in the field about the nature of history, historiography, and the tradition.

When I first learned of Dave Tell’s project, I expected his book to be dominated by religious exegesis. I suspect I am hardly alone in this assumption. Nowhere is confession a more preeminent and slavish requirement than in religious practice, specifically in the Judeo-Christian idioms that dominate the American psyche, and our blind(ing) faith in religion’s standard of confession affects the public’s consumption of media. Consider American Crime Story (FX) portraying the O.J. Simpson trial, Confirmation (HBO) about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, Making a Murderer (Netflix), a documentary series on the trials of Steven Avery, or Serial, a podcast series—the fastest to garner 5 million downloads—covering the murder of Hae Min Lee for which Adnan Syed was convicted. The popularity of these shows manifests the ubiquity of what Tell calls “confessional hermeneutics,” the “collaborative but always contested activity of deciding which texts do, and which texts do not, qualify as confessions” (3). In Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America, Tell outlines various forms of confessional hermeneutics to foreground the cultural significance of confession.The point Tell drives home repeatedly is that confession matters; it is a critical cog in the machinery of American social life. In the twentieth-century, Tell finds that confessional hermeneutics “concretely shaped the public understanding of six intractable issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy” (4). Understanding confession’s role relative to these six crucial cultural topoi requires “those of us invested in public discourse to understand the confession, not as a stable, ahistorical form, but as a practice informed by competing traditions” (144). Failing to do so risks ignoring the “genre politics” (183) that make confession “a powerful but volatile political resource” (187), an “important, if often overlooked form of cultural intervention” (184). To support this argument, Confessional Crises rehearses six key confessional crises spanning the twentieth-century: Bernarr Macfadden’s 1919 launch and subsequent transformation of True Story; William Huie’s 1956 publication of the confessions of Emmett Till’s murderers; the publication in 1967 of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; and the confession controversies sparked by Jimmy Swaggart and Bill Clinton. For Tell, cultural politics trump generic constraints: each case illustrates that “the rhetorical function of a confession is determined more by the political needs of the confessant than by the formal features of the text” (124).Take, for example, chapter one on the subjective sexual moralism in Macfadden’s launch of True Story magazine. As Tell recounts, Macfadden reasoned that the best way to inoculate the public against sexual malaise was by presenting them with the unvarnished truth about sex. For Americans to avoid the sexual pitfalls Macfadden adduced to ignorance and scripted silences around the body, “the American people needed a moral reeducation” on matters of sexuality and “just as insistently that they needed a rhetorical reeducation” (28). Why the rhetorical reeducation? Because Macfadden needed real-life stories to advance his moral-political agenda. Through sidebars and editorials, Macfadden coached readers on how to read the stories he published as authentic accounts of ordinary people. The arrangement was straightforward: the “unvarnished prose guarantee[d] the authenticity of the tales, and the authenticity of the tales guarantee[d] the propagation of moral virtue” (41). Frank testimony about bodily fantasies and functions was Macfadden’s antidote to ignorance about sexual matters.In the 1930s, Tell finds that Macfadden pivoted from sexual politics to class politics, changing the import of confession. This is the story of chapter two. As millions battled the scourge of the depression, True Story began to foreground “a well-remunerated working class, the desires of which True Story perfectly expressed” (47). Why would as staunch a moralist as Macfadden engage in such a mendacity? Herein lies the re-conscription, Tell holds, of confession, except this time with capitalism not moralism as the telos. Macfadden needed to transform his readership into a consumer class so he could sell access to advertisers. Just as he had instructed the public in the appreciation of plain speech, Macfadden directed his rhetorical pedagogy at America’s captains of industry: “he told executives that if they squinted just right, if they learned to read True Story properly, they could see between the lines of his true stories millions of affluent, docile and eager, consumers” (55). Using Macfadden’s example, Tell articulates confession to both sexual and class politics.Or take the controversies about William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, the subject of chapter four, which Tell uses to connect confession to the politics of violence. Two arguments about the reception of Styron’s Confessions form the vectors of this connection. First is that whether one deemed Styron’s book an expression of Turner’s admission turned less on the fidelity of Styron’s content to Turner than it did on the politics of the different respondents. At stake was how one understood the nature of slavery and the status of the African-American within it: “was the American slave a ‘Sambo,’ a happy-go-lucky, bumbling fool, given to petty thievery but fundamentally docile” owing either to racial inferiority (as Ulrich Phillips believed) or to slavery’s brutality (as Stanley Elkins and Styron held), “or was the slave a seething embodiment of resentment, incensed by the brutality of the ruling class and prone to rebellion” as Herbert Aptheker argued? (99). Differences of opinion on these matters framed the contested reception of Confessions. Second is that differences of opinion between White defenders of Styron and his Black critics were based in competing ideologies about “the legibility of violence” (112). For many White reviewers of Confessions, violence was simply beyond understanding. They wondered, “what could have prompted someone to lead a rebellion so violent?” (106). Enter confession: “only confession—an insider’s account—could possibly redress so profound a mystery” (106). “For Styron’s black critics,” however, “Turner’s rebellion was perfectly legible” (112). The formerly colonized and enslaved required no special erudition, no fancy literary conceit, to understand the rebellion. Confessions, to these critics, read instead as Styron’s confession to imbibing “the fantasies of the southern tradition” (115) that sanitized the violence of slavery while exaggerating that of slaves like Turner. Confessional Crises thus associates confession, through a postcolonial hermeneutic, to violence.Readers of AHR will appreciate the theoretical history Tell brings to bear in his analyses of Jimmy Swaggart and Bill Clinton, the subjects of chapters five and six. Yes, argues Tell, Swaggart fashioned, with the aid of the leadership of the Assemblies of God, a confession he and his allies presented as a Christian confession. The imbroglio he found himself in demanded that. Yet despite appearances, Swaggart’s, Tell insists, was no Christian confession. Instead, Swaggart’s apology bore the blueprint of a distinctly modern secular confession. Specifically, “his emphasis on the inadequacy of speech, his devaluation of grammatical sensibilities and logical coherence, and his emphasis on his humanity” (136) constituted Swaggart’s rhetoric as a modern secular confession. To prove this point, Tell contrasts the genealogies of classical-Christian confession (123-4; 129-30) and modern secular confession (130-36). By retracing to Periclean Athens those tenets of classical confession that were eventually appropriated by Christianity, this discussion carefully historicizes confession in religion and politics. But this retracing also exposes the Athenian-Augustinian model of confession Tell endorses to criticisms first raised by feminist and critical race scholars. If Augustine’s Roman Empire and contemporary America attest that confession can function as “a means of reversing the political currents of pridefulness” (130), both societies also evince the limits of that power. What confession, whose confession, could have challenged the pride that drove slavery and genocide in the Roman Empire, or “shock-and-awe,” the “New Jim Crow,” and the FISA court in the American?In chapter six, which focuses on the crisis ignited by the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, Tell isolates confession’s function in democracy. Re-contextualizing Clinton’s rhetorical performances of 1998 in light of statements Clinton made during the Gennifer Flowers controversy in 1991-92, Tell credits the president with showcasing the ideal of democratic public confession, a “belief that public confession must hold in equipoise the competing needs of contrition and legal argument” (162). Prosecutor Kenneth Star and the many critics of Clinton’s vexatious semantics upheld an established tradition of confession, one in which, “only an unlimited admission of guilt counted as a confession” (162). Confession, the reader learns, influences how the public understands politics.By the end of Confessional Crises, the reader has gathered an expansive vocabulary for understanding the power of confessional practices. But how to assess a project so expansive, so revisionist, and transdisciplinary? Let me end by returning to the beginning. The introduction of Confessional Crises advertises the book as “the first reception history of confession,” (6) acknowledging the influence of Steven Mailloux. This hat-tip points us to Mailloux’s ambitious project for criteria by which to judge Confessional Crises. Since Mailloux explains that “Reception history is rhetorical hermeneutics” (ix), readers can thus pose Mailloux’s famous definition of rhetorical hermeneutics as a question of Confessional Crises: does it use “rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (ix)? Anyone who reads Confessional Crises will find that in it, Tell fulfills this tripartite obligation elegantly. He relies on discourse, develops fresh ideas about confession, and generates a record of the past.

It is important to begin this essay with a note about language. The international scope of Quintilian studies is evidenced by the number of European languages used to discuss him—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as English. Two major recent collections of studies about Quintilian are written mainly in continental languages. The larger is the three-volume Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica edited by Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Río, and José Antonio Caballero López; it includes 123 essays mostly in Spanish but with some French and English. The work stems from an international conference held in Madrid and in Calahorra, Spain (Quintilian’s birthplace) to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the publication of the Institutio Oratoria. Another collection is Quintilien: ancien et moderne (2012), edited by Perrine-Ferdinand Galand, Carlos Lévy and Wim Verbaal, with thirty-one essays in French. These are largely inaccessible to monophone English speakers, as are some important individual studies such as Gualtiero Calboli, Quintiliano y su Escuela; Otto Seel, Quintilian: oder, die kunst des Redners und Schweigens; or Jean Cousin, Récherches sur Quintilien.The reader of this essay, then, should be aware that the English works discussed here are but a small part of a wider international undertaking. The numbers, too, are worth noting. For example, the online Quintilian bibliography by Thorsten Burkard of Kiel University in Germany lists 847 items arranged in fourteen subject sections, while the World Catalog displays 5,179 records (of which 1,896 are in English) and the Melvyl search engine for University of California libraries finds 1,125 Quintilian entries in that system alone. The first (and only) bibliography of Quintilian published in America, in 1981, was that of Keith V. Erickson in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, listing nearly 800 books and articles alphabetized by author. Thus what we discuss here is in a sense only the tip of a scholarly iceberg.The best single short introduction to Quintilian is an essay by Jorge Fernández López, “Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric. Fernández López presents a balanced view of what Quintilian has in mind in his Institutio Oratoria, with sections on biography, the meaning and structure of the Institutio, early education, the system of rhetoric, style, the orator in action, and the author’s approach to rhetoric and morals.One of the most important recent contributions to making Quintilian text accessible was the publication in 2001 of Donald A. Russell’s edition and translation of his Institutio Oratoria in a five-volume Loeb Classical Library set. The previous Loeb translation was by H. E. Butler in 1921–22 in four volumes. Russell’s smooth translation and more extensive notes make his work superior to that of Butler. Russell makes adroit use of sentence variety and punctuation to make his translation more readable than Butler’s, which tends to follow more literally Quintilian’s often periodic style with its long multi-clausal sentences. Also, Butler had provided only two short indices of “Names and Words” in the Institutio, with comparatively few notes to the text itself, while Russell supplies copious notes to virtually every page of the text; in addition he completes the whole set at the end of Volume Five with an “Index of Proper Names,” and Indexes to Books 1–12 which include a 33-page “General Index.” an “Index to Rhetorical and Grammatical Terms,” and an “Index of Authors and Passages Quoted.” Moreover, Russell provides an introduction to each of the twelve books that includes a summary of that book’s contents—a valuable resource for the reader struggling to cope with the sheer magnitude of the Institutio. It is the addition of these new notes and the 100 pages of indexes at the end that make the Russell longer than the Butler, but the value to the reader makes it worthwhile.Also new is the appearance of the first one-volume translation of the Institutio, a print version of the translation by John Selby Watson (1856) as revised and edited online by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and edited for print by Honeycutt and Curtis Dozier in 2015. The 686-page paperback is available for purchase under the title Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory, or, Education of an Orator, and is also available online. The volume includes Watson’s own “Preface” and “Life of Quintilian,” together with a twenty-five page summary of the Institutio, by book and chapter, keyed to the page numbers of the translation. (These chapter headings are then repeated throughout the volume.) There are none of Watson’s notes to the translation, Honeycutt explains, because they were omitted to save space for fitting it into the one volume; he recommends that the reader consult Russell’s notes. Despite that problem, this one-volume translation may be useful to readers for its portability and low cost compared to the five-volume Loeb Library translation of Russell.Tobias Reinhardt and Michael Winterbottom have edited Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2. This volume includes not only the Latin text of Book 2 (1–34) but also an informative 50-page “Introduction” which examines Quintilian’s teaching methods, his concept of rhetoric, and his strategies in presenting his ideas. But the vast majority of the volume (35–394) offers meticulous commentaries on the 21 chapters of Book Two. A short prose summary introduces each chapter; then the editors painstakingly examine key Latin words and phrases in the text. Many of these observations are highly technical and demand some knowledge of Latin or Greek. On the other hand, many others may be illuminating to a general reader, as in the opening of chapter 11 (175–176), where the editors discuss Quintilian’s response to those who think rhetorical precepts are not necessary. Book 2 is an important one in the Institutio, for in it Quintilian ends his formal exposition of early education and begins his discussion of rhetoric.Another recent reprinting, of Book 10 of the Institutio, may seem at first glance to be of interest only to skilled classical scholars. This is William Peterson, Quintilian: Institutionis Oratoriae; Liber Decimus, originally published 1891, but now edited by Giles Lauren with a “Foreword” by James J. Murphy. It includes the Latin text of Book 10 with extensive notes mostly in English, with a full summary of the book (1–12), a useful short chapter on Quintilian’s literary criticism, and a longer one on his use of language with numerous examples in both English and Latin. Even the non-Latinate reader may find things to learn in this volume. Peterson was a child prodigy—he wrote this 290-page book at age 24—who later went on to become Principal of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.The most recent addition to the availability of Quintilian’s work is Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of the Institutio Oratoria, second edition, edited by James J. Murphy and Cleve Weise. Part One of the introduction discusses Quintilian’s teaching methods, including verification from modern cognitive science of his views on habit (hexis), together with some possibilities for modern applications of his principles; also Part Two presents four sets of Quintilian-based exercises designed to encourage close reading of the three translations which follow.The best single book on Quintilian, George A. Kennedy’s Quintilian, was published in 1969 by Twayne Publishers as part of their World Author series but has long been out of print. It has now reappeared in a revised edition as Kennedy, Quintilian: A Roman Educator and His Quest for the Perfect Orator. This slim (117 pages) volume is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with the identification of “important sources and special studies at the beginning of each chapter rather than combining all bibliography in a single alphabetical list at the end of the book. This avoids the use of footnotes …” (1). While the book is ostensibly divided into sections representing Quintilian’s background, educational plan, rhetoric, and the “good man” concept in Book 12, what Kennedy actually presents is a thorough summary of the Institutio coupled with a far-ranging personal critique not only of the Institutio but of the man himself. He treats both Quintilian’s aspirations and what he views as his faults, and concludes the book with a discussion of Cornelius Tacitus (55?–117 CE) and the view that the Institutio had changed nothing in Rome. But Kennedy, author of so many books on classical rhetoric and its history, is so steeped in Roman culture that he writes easily about complex events; for example his portrayal of Quintilian’s possible reasons for retirement and the composition of the Institutio (22–28) reads almost like a novel. Anyone, expert or beginner, can profit from Kennedy’s observations.(Editor’s note: the following survey does not attempt to list every recent reference to Quintilian, or every entry for him in handbooks or encyclopedias. Nor does it follow every use in textbooks where his doctrines are mingled with others, as for example in the successive editions of works like Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student, and Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. The emphasis here instead is on books and articles which elucidate his text or lay out directions for future research.)A useful place to start is with three collections of essays, two of which contain a mixture of languages but do offer some valuable English contributions. The first one, already mentioned, is the massive three-volume Quintiliano (1998) edited by Tomás Albaladejo et al. Eleven of its 131 essays are in English, with contributions by Adams, Albaladejo, Cockcroft, Hallsall, Harsting, Hatch, Kennedy, Murphy, Willbanks, Winterbottom, and Woods. Its 1561 pages are continuously paginated.Another, smaller gathering presents twelve essays in two special issues of Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, under the title “The Institutio Oratoria after 1900 years.” Six of the essays are in English, by Cranz, Fantham, France, Kraus, Sussman, and Ward.The volume Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics (2003), edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, offers 25 essays, all of them in English, covering a wider range of subjects than the title might indicate. The book stems from a conference held at Tilburg in The Netherlands in 2001 convened by the Willem Witteveen and the editor “to try and assess [sic] Quintilian’s significance for students and practitioners of the art of persuasion in antiquity and in modern times” (Preface). The authors of six chapters do cover law and jurisprudence: Lewis, Robinson, Rossi, Tellegen, Tellegen-Couperus, and Witteveen. Another five focus on the courtroom and persuasion of judges: Henket, Katula, Martín, Mastrorosa, and Tellegen-Couperus in a second essay. Two deal with reading and writing in Book 10: Murphy and Taekema. The remainder discuss a variety of topics, including emotion, language, argument, and figures. In sum, this collection should prove valuable even to readers not primarily interested in law.The first observation to be made about current research is that, with the possible exception of Kennedy’s Quintilian, there is no book-length analytic study of Quintilian in English. But while Kennedy’s charming introduction to Quintilian does provide biographical information together with a running summary of the Institutio Oratoria, it is not intended as a thorough exploration of the many issues in this complex work. It is of course not surprising that we lack such a book, given the knowledges required—rhetoricians and students of education often lack sophisticated knowledge of ancient Roman culture, while classicists sometimes fail to appreciate the nuances of Quintilian’s rhetoric and pedagogy.Understandably, then, the overwhelming majority of articles and book chapters published since 1990 deal with particular, comparatively small segments of the Quintilian corpus. They present such a kaleidoscopic array that it seems best to group them by subject areas.The largest number of these (seventeen to be exact) discuss the later history of the Institutio Oratoria, its “reception” or “influence” in various times and places. They cover a wide range of topics: Renaissance learning (Classen); Saint Jerome (Davis “Culture”); Rousseau (France); Hugh Blair (Halloran; Hatch); the nineteenth century (Johnson); women in the Renaissance (Klink); Czech thought (Kraus); Milton and Ramus (Lares); Italian Renaissance (Monfasani); the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Murphy “Quintilian’s Influence”); Obadiah Walker (O’Rourke); eloquence in Quintilian’s time (Osgood); early modern role models (Rossi); and the Middle Ages (Ward; Woods).Teaching and its psychology interest another seventeen of the authors: Bloomer (“Schooling,” “Quintilian”); Brand et al.; Briggs; Connelly; Corbeill; Fantham (“The Concept of Nature”); Furse; Ker; Montefusco; Morgan (Literate Education); Murphy (“The Key Role of Habit,” “Quintilian’s Advice,” “Roman Writing Instruction”); Richlin; Too; Van Elst and Woners; Woods.Some of Quintilian’s specific teaching methods are treated: declamation (Breij; Friend; Kasper; Kennedy “Roman Declamation”; Mendelson “Declamation”; Sussman; Wiese); Progymnasmata (Fleming; Henderson; Kennedy, Progymnasmata; Webb); and imitation (Harsting; Taoka; Terrill).The application of Quintilian’s principles to modern education is the subject for six authors: Bourelle; Corbett and Connors; Crowley and Hawhee; Kasper.Another five works discuss the Institutio Oratoria itself: Adams; Celentano; López “The Concept”); and Murphy, Katula and Hoppman.Law attracts another five: Lewis; Martín; Robinson, Tellegen; Tellegen-Couperus (Quintilian and the Law).Emotion is the subject of three essays: Cockcoft; Katula (“Emotion”; Leigh.Language, writing, and style attract another eight authors: Chico-Rico; Craig; Davis (“Quintilian on Writing”); d’Esperey; Lausberg; Murphy (“Roman Writing Instruction”); Tellegen-Couperus (“Style and Law”); Wooten.Not surprisingly, there is interest in the subject of rhetoric in eight works: Albaladejo, Gunderson (“The Rhetoric”); Heath; Kennedy, (“Rhetoric,” A New History, “Peripatetic Rhetoric”); Roochnik; Wulfing.Quintilian as a person, including his vir bonus concept, draws the attention of Cranz; Halsall; Kennedy (Quintilian); Lanham; Logie; Walzer (Quintilian’s).One final note is to remark on the appearance of four Ph.D. dissertations in this array of studies (Furse; Ker; Klink; Wiese) together with two M.A. theses (Francoz; O’Rourke). Doctoral dissertations can be located fairly easily through normal bibliographic channels, but the identification of master’s theses is much more difficult. In any case, it is hoped that their appearance marks faculty interest in Quintilian in their respective institutions.

ABSTRACTThis essay makes the case that the account of delivery featured in the Institutio Oratoria remains germane to contemporary speech pedagogy. Quintilian emphasizes that (1) powerful delivery is central to eloquent public speaking; (2) delivery functions in concert with the other canons of rhetoric; and (3) delivery is governed by general rhetorical concepts such as decorum and ethos. Furthermore, scrutiny of Quintilian’s perspectives on gender and power can lead to fruitful rethinking of current pedagogy’s traditionalist tendencies.

“In this issue, we learn that what gets written into law is as important as what gets intentionally omitted and that campus timely warnings are likely neither timely nor warning. We also learn the value of hashtags in cultivating concerned publics, how cynicism can be productive, and how public rhetoric can be a symbolic and material activity.”

The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling stands as one of the more important cases for the American civil rights movement. The Brown decision overturned separate but equal and set off a firestorm of resistance efforts throughout the South. Virginia set the precedent for this countermovement known as Massive Resistance through the development of arguments and policies to thwart integration. These arguments were based in racialized constructions of citizenship. Examining the discourse of segregationists furthers our understanding of how race is reproduced and controlled through public discourse.

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities.

“What I have offered is less an employable set of texts, lessons, or advice, and more the performance of a teacher coming to terms with race in pedagogy both during and after the course. What I have done is (re)turn to rhetoric.”

“By re-imagining cynicism’s utility as a productive stance, we can identify several tactics for intervention in matters of political and ethical import. Adopting cynicism requires us to introduce provocative language in the public sphere.”

Over twenty years ago in William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary Copeland’s edited volume, Critical Questions, Thomas W. Benson likened his research to doing “part of society’s homework” (185). The ends of scholarship, he suggested, were to encourage others to reflect critically upon social practices and the institutions that invite them. In Posters for Peace, Benson performs this homework by analyzing posters he collected and saved in May 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. These posters protested President Richard Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia, despite earlier assurances that he would deescalate U.S. military action in Vietnam. Benson situates these artifacts in a longer rhetorical tradition of poster use and compares them with another instance of ephemeral war protest: the graffiti he observed in Rome during a 2004 protest of the Iraq War. Throughout his analysis, Benson also weaves an account of disciplinary shifts during the early 1970s, which made analyses of visual rhetoric possible in the first place. Thus, Benson offers both a rhetorical history and history of rhetoric in Posters for Peace.As the author of a rhetorical history, Benson begins by describing the context in which these posters were produced. He identifies a few antecedents that may have influenced the use of posters at Berkeley. Most immediately, the Berkeley artists were likely inspired by the 1968 Paris protestors’ posters, as well as the psychedelic posters circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Benson also notes the U.S. government’s substantial use of posters during the 1930s and 40s to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and national unity during World War II. The extent to which the Berkeley protests were inspired directly by these government posters is unclear, though Benson ably demonstrates a preexisting tradition of political poster use in the U.S. Significantly, his inclusion of a White House photograph of Nixon delivering his Cambodia address underscores the political importance of posters during the 1970s. In this photograph, the president points to a map of Cambodia while justifying military action. In a way, then, the Berkeley protesters countered Nixon’s visual rhetoric with some of their own.Following Benson’s extended essay, Posters for Peace contains full-page color reproductions of the 66 posters he saved. The Berkeley posters are mostly original art on silk-screen, though some are based on photographs or employ photo offset printing. Many of these are visually stunning. One does not get the sense that they were produced for posterity, however. Most of them were printed on the backside of used tractor-feed printer paper or whatever cardstock was handy. They were distributed freely and ended up on fences, dorm room walls, picket signs, and so forth. Some of them were preserved in Benson’s own private collection until 2008, when he donated them to the Penn State University Libraries on the condition that they were “freely available for nonprofit educational uses” (4).Most of the posters in Benson’s collection are antiwar. Some, however, advocate for civil rights in the U.S. Although Benson arranges the color reproductions of these posters in a roughly thematic fashion, he does not adhere strictly to this sequence in his analysis. Instead, he often skips around, thereby knitting them together as a cohesive unit. For instance, on pages 41–42 he references plates 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33, 13, and 27—in that order. His analysis identifies inventional similarities between them. Moreover, this approach has the additional benefit of tacitly promoting a disruptive reading of the posters by encouraging readers to view them in no fixed order.In his analysis, Benson attempts to recover the meanings that a passersby would have understood in 1970. He finds much to praise in these posters. Although posters are often classified as tools of propaganda, Benson observes that, “many of the Berkeley posters invoke a reflexivity about their own persuasion and call for discussion beyond the poster—asking not merely for belief or action, but for speech, participation, deliberation” (48). To a modern eye, the posters’ emphasis on civic deliberation may be easily taken for granted. At the time, however, prominent politicians such as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew sought to curtail criticisms of the war in Vietnam by associating the antiwar movement as unpatriotic and unrepresentative of U.S. public opinion. In Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, for instance, he described the antiwar protesters as a fervent “vocal minority” and juxtaposed them with a patriotic “silent majority,” who, he claimed, supported his own strategy in Vietnam. The best citizen, Nixon suggested, was a silent one. Benson’s analysis both demonstrates and celebrates the students’ determination to speak out and legitimize their opposition to the war.Similarly to the tumultuous political climate that birthed the Berkeley protest posters, the speech-communication discipline underwent substantial change in the early 1970s. According to Benson, The discipline, while not abandoning its interest in Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric, was already moving rapidly in other directions, seeking to understand rhetoric from the point of view of the citizen whose judgment was being solicited, recovering marginal voices, asking questions about the ethics of persuasion, investigating the rhetorical action of non-oratorical forms, pressing forward on the close reading of rhetorical texts, and inquiring about empirical matters such as the preparation, circulation, and reception of rhetoric. (54)To demonstrate this shift, Benson identifies Robert P. Newman’s, Hermann Stelzner’s, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s, and Forbes I. Hill’s rhetorical analyses of the “Silent Majority” speech. Benson also highlights the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, which met in 1970 to discuss the scope of rhetoric and the appropriate means for studying it. More precisely, these meetings helped legitimize scholarship that examined non-oratorical forms. Benson’s analysis of the Berkeley posters is particularly fitting in that he collected them the same month that he attended Pheasant Run. In so doing, Benson returns readers to a historic intersection of war protests, visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory.Despite Benson’s presence at Berkeley and Pheasant Run, his analysis abstains from auto-ethnography. Indeed, Benson does not mention until the last two pages of Posters for Peace that he attended Pheasant Run. Glimmers of this project’s personal significance shine throughout, nonetheless. For instance, Benson incorporates nearly thirty photographs he took of visual rhetoric protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These photographs are helpful for illustrating his argument. Their layout could have been stronger in his section on the Roman graffiti, however. Although Benson concludes his discussion of the graffiti on page 83, photographs from Rome appear on each subsequent page until page 95. One suspects that these photographs of graffiti could have been condensed into one section. Moreover, two photographs of the Roman Pasquino statue (figures 34 and 35) appear redundant. These are minor issues, however, in an otherwise well-structured book.Posters for Peace gives readers pause to consider the role of archives in rhetorical scholarship. In recent years, the term archive has expanded within the humanities to encompass not simply institutional collections, such as those found at presidential libraries, but also those created by scholars in the course of their research. What makes Benson’s book exceptional is that he illustrates both senses of the word archive. Insofar as these posters and photographs are freely available in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries, other scholars may make recourse to these historically significant artifacts. Additionally, Posters for Peace may serve as a model for scholars who are interested in preserving the ephemeral texts they study.Several years ago, in Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope’s edited collection on visual rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric Communication and American Culture, Benson invited students and scholars alike to note the significance of visual texts—exclaiming, “Look, Rhetoric!” In Posters for Peace, Benson demonstrates first-hand the value of this exhortation—both in his analysis and in creation of an archive of ephemeral visual texts. Scholars interested in visual rhetoric, protest rhetoric, or rhetorical history will profit greatly from reading Benson’s book. It is well written and offers a unique retrospective of the academic and political discussions in the early 1970s. Inasmuch as Benson offers a glimpse into the theoretical changes then afoot in speech communication, I suspect that this volume will be of special importance to young scholars as they navigate disciplinary narratives. In short, Posters for Peace is sure to inspire scholars and inform their own work as they complete part of society’s homework, too.

This useful, clearly written, and highly satisfying book is Laurent Pernot’s second major English-language contribution to rhetorical scholarship, after his 2005 Rhetoric in Antiquity (originally La rhétorique dans l’antiquité in 2000). Here Pernot builds on work from his earlier career, in particular his 1993 La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain.The point of departure, in Chapter One, is the striking proliferation of epideictic genres in later antiquity—or, at least, the number of genres recognized as “epideictic” by rhetoricians, rhetors, and their audiences. Whereas Aristotle has a limited notion of the epideictic “genus,” by Menander Rhetor’s time, roughly the late third century, the category has evolved to include a wide range of genres, each with its own distinct (if overlapping) inventional topoi. The list includes the traditional funeral speech (epitaphios logos) and the festival speech (panēgyrikos logos) as well as various kinds of encomia in praise of individuals, cities, harbors, aqueducts, and so on. There is also the imperial oration, the birthday speech, the nuptial speech delivered outside the bedroom door, the welcome-speech to an arriving official as he stepped ashore, and the farewell speech when he left. There were also forms of speech that took the functions of ancient poetry, such as the victory-speech (the epinikios logos), a prose equivalent to Pindar’s odes for victorious athletes, or Aelius Aristides’ “hymns” and “monodies” in prose (see Regarding Sarapis). At the same time a number of ancient, poetic forms persisted, such as hymns to the gods and mythic narratives (e.g., the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic poem about the god’s conquest of India), and these were called “epideictic” too.And so on again. I have not yet even mentioned Hermogenes of Tarsus’ classification of all poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure panegyric,” i.e., as epideictic rhetoric (On Types of Style 2.12). Further, as Pernot suggests in Chapter Three (97–99), encomiastic or parainetic praise might function as an important element in practical deliberative and judicial discourse, and even as a kind of deliberative discourse in itself. (Parainesis praises ethical virtues and exhorts the listener to observe them, as in Isocrates’ To Nicocles.) While Pernot may not be willing to go that far, we do find confirmation in Byzantine lists of model texts for imitation, in which Plutarch’s Moralia (Ta Ēthika) stand as examples of the “deliberative” genre.Pernot’s basic point in Chapter One is that the “rise of epideictic” to ascendency in later antiquity was an “irresistible” and “unstoppable” phenomenon (27) that the usual histories of rhetoric have mostly failed to understand. But if we set aside the usual assumption that epideictic is “mere” display, epideictic proves itself more creative and more vital—and more pragmatically consequential—than we tend to think.Pernot addresses this challenge in two main ways. The first is to define epideictic more precisely—to specify what is not epideictic. If, for example, we follow Aristotle’s audience-subject-time definition of the three (why three?) “genres” of rhetoric, it appears that there are two fairly specific kinds of practical civic speech addressed to judges in a well-defined civic space (a court of law, a council-hall, a public assembly), and besides these a third and vaguer kind, epideictic, which is not addressed to judges but to theōroi, “observers/spectators.” The audiences of the two practical genres (jurymen, councilors) are empowered to issue legally binding decrees (Socrates is guilty; send reinforcements to the expedition in Sicily). The theōros of epideictic, in contrast, is not empowered to issue binding judgments, but is concerned with observing a display (epideixis) of praise or blame in the present moment. Epideictic is defined in terms of lack.The argument would take too long to work out here, but the ultimate effect of that definition is to assign all speech not specifically addressed to judges in some sort of court or council-hall to epideictic. All speech, after all, implicitly blames and praises in some way. If you refute my argument you “blame” its defective reasoning; if you defend and confirm it, you “praise” the quality of its undeniable proofs. Even at the level of word choice, to state the obvious, every choice implies some evaluative attitude toward what is named, and thus implicitly blames or praises it. So we have a three-part classification of rhetorical genres consisting of two specific kinds of speeches (judicial and deliberative) and all other human language use (epideictic).Pernot’s basic remedy is to limit the notion of epideictic to encomiastic discourse: a more or less determinate genre (as codified, for example, in ancient progymnasmata manuals) whose evolution can be traced from a handful of early exemplars to the profusion we see later. This move has the virtue of keeping epideictic within the category of civic discourse. The encomium, the panegyric, and their derivatives are normally performed in some sort of sanctioned civic space or event, such as a state funeral, a religious festival, a celebratory homecoming for a victorious athlete, and so on, by a person specially commissioned for the job and considered worthy of it. The speech then worked to forge or refresh a communion of shared belief by eliciting approval for the praise bestowed on the honoree—a rhetorical effect that often was more important than the honoree’s real character (see Leslie Kurke’s The Traffic in Praise).The second approach to the “unstoppable” rise of epideictic in later antiquity is mostly an extension of the first. We need to consider the socio-political structure of the Greco-Roman world, and the occasions and spaces it provided for public speech, in order to understand the proliferation of encomiastic genres. As I have argued elsewhere, we cannot explain the rise of epideictic merely by invoking the supposed “decay” of judicial and symbouleutic rhetoric. In fact, in every major town and city in the Roman Empire there were courts of law and council-halls, and these continued to be busy (if confined to local matters and restrained by procedural regulations and written law). To understand the rise of epideictic/encomiastic rhetoric, we must understand the role it played in sustaining the sense of a common culture shared by the far-flung, multiethnic elites that ran the Roman Empire (which one could argue was more like a multinational corporation than a modern state). From this perspective, the encomiastic culture of epideictic very effectively performed the role attributed in Cicero’s De Oratore to the “perfect orator.”Two quick remarks. One: identifying epideictic with civic encomia has many virtues, as noted above, but I wonder what happens to, for example, Hermogenes’ treatment of poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure” epideictic (panegyric)—as opposed to “practical” (civic) epideictic. These “pure” (meaning unmixed) types can be seen as also participating in praise and blame, and as forging or undermining different kinds of cultural communion. Two: the notion of sustaining a common culture among the Roman Empire’s administrative class—some of whom were Syrians, Greeks, North Africans, and so on—is very appealing, but I suspect that some readers will want to hear more about the less-irenic tensions in Greco-Roman culture and what role Hermogenes’ “pure epideictic” genres played in ideological insurgencies.From here I will be very brief. My water-clock has just about run out.Chapter Two, “The Grammar of Praise,” details the lists of topoi specified for different types of epideictic, offers a brief typology of speeches, and makes a list of characteristic figures (apostrophe, hyperbole, and comparative metaphor). Much of this will not be news for anyone familiar with Menander Rhetor, but it will be an excellent introduction for those who are not. The core argument, regarding epideictic as an instrument of communion, will be interesting to all.Chapter Three, “Why Epideictic Rhetoric?” takes on the traditional suspicion of epideictic as empty flattery and/or inconsequential display. Most of the arguments of this chapter are reflected in the paragraphs above: epideictic rhetoric has persuasory functions that are socially and politically consequential. Perhaps what is most interesting in this chapter is Pernot’s account of the circumstances of epideictic performance in antiquity and, especially, his estimates of the length of epideictic speeches (82): for example, Aelius Aristide’s Regarding Rome takes about one hour to deliver; imperial panegyrics took 30 minutes. (The addressees, after all, were busy people.) This chapter is worth the whole book.Chapter Four, “New Approaches in Epideictic,” suggests directions for future research. These include an “anthropological” application of speech-act theory to the performative and ceremonial aspects of epideictic discourse, and the uses of silence and “veiled” discourse to communicate what might be dangerous to say, or to promote subversive “dissent and denunciation” instead of “communion.” This will, I suspect, be the preferred direction of many readers. Pernot, however, both acknowledges that preference and calls for “a little more patience” with epideictic as an irenic and utopian instrument of communion (99–100). It may not be a bad idea to consider it that way first.

ABSTRACT A theoretical bias pervades enthymeme. Most studies of the enthymeme are thoroughly Aristotelian and syllogistic, while the study of enthymemes in ancient oratory is virtually nonexistent. Yet the Attic orators used enthymemes commonly and consistently, and as practitioners, they have something to teach us about enthymemes that theorists can’t. In this article, I begin an examination of oratorical enthymemes and the variety of their use and offer a preliminary understanding of the “oratorical enthymeme” as a rhetorical technique. I conclude by briefly touching on the connections between oratorical enthymemes and ancient theory.

Institutions of postsecondary education, and the field of writing across the curriculum and in the disciplines (WAC/WID) in particular, need to do more to trouble learning paradigms that employ writing only in service to particular disciplines, only in traditional learning environments, and only in particular languages, or in service to an overly narrow or generalized idea of who students are, where they're going, and what they need to get there. In relating a cross-section of a larger effort to study and support writing as a high-impact practice in a student chapter of an international nonprofit humanitarian engineering student organization, I will demonstrate that WAC/WID can and should empower students to use writing in student organizations, especially those that align with the four learning outcomes deemed essential by the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America's Promise, as a means of integrating into and interrogating their social and political realities, and reshaping postsecondary education to better meet their needs and goals as individual learners and as citizens in a deliberative democracy.

Book & New Media Reviews Book & New Media Reviews trial.These examples illustrate how people from the outside often have comparative social power.In acknowledgement of this power differential, Coogan engages in a set of ethical best practices throughout the project. 2 For example, he purposely did not read background information offered to him about the participants' crimes.This distancing allows the writers to reveal this information when they are ready.Secondly, all participants gave final approval for the way their writing appears in the book, and they were given the option of using a pseudonym.In a consent form, Coogan also made it clear that the writers could stop participating at any time.Notably, workshop participation did not obligate them to publish in the book.These measures provide opportunities for agency and indicate a profound respect for participants.Finally, Coogan and the writers made publication decisions together.In opposition to a topdown model in which the program facilitator decides how and when the stories enter the public sphere, publication with an academic press was a collective decision.As more people venture into the uncharted territory of carceral writing, it is clear that we need to think carefully about power and ethical practices.This work offers a crucial step in the right direction.The writing workshop has been succeeded by Open Minds, a program Coogan founded in 2010, that enables incarcerated people to take courses with college students and faculty from Virginia Commonwealth University.In addition, Coogan invites former participants of the project to speak in his prison literature classes.These approaches, along with Writing Our Way Out, are critical for countering monolithic conceptions of people who are incarcerated.The stereotypes circulating in the public sphere are counterproductive to the shift in public opinion needed for meaningful intervention in the broken U.S. criminal justice system.As a counterpublic text, this book provides a valuable blueprint for scholars, educators, and activists to become part of the intervention, and ultimately, the solution.

The controversy about vaccines and autism presents an opportunity to explore how science is constructed in public debates about health and medicine. Rhetors who argue against a connection between vaccines and autism insist that their opponents are irrational, while rhetors arguing for a link insist that their fears are rational indeed. This analysis poses an alternative way of understanding the vaccines-autism controversy, suggesting that it is partly fueled by differing perceptions of the boundary between science and non-science. Using the concept of boundary work as a lens, this article uses generative rhetorical criticism to examine artifacts within the controversy and explores rhetorical constructions of scientific evidence, the forum of scientific discourse, scientific expertise, and the scientific capability. The findings suggest that rhetors’ awareness of disciplinary boundaries is just as important in the construction and reception of their arguments as their knowledge of scientific facts and principles.

This essay critiques science diplomacy discourse generated by President Obama’s “New Beginning” speech at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, which launched a program of action in education, science, technology, and innovation to build trust between Muslim-majority countries and the United States. I contend that the Cairo Agenda sparked parallel dialogues, carried out in two separate loci of discourse: the official public sphere through which the Cairo Agenda was promoted, and a reticulate public sphere dedicated to Muslim science. My critique explores the quality and substance of the border crossings between these two arenas. I introduce science diplomacy’s value as a strategy for cross-cultural engagement, then illustrate and comment on the dialogues taking place within the Cairo Agenda and Muslim science arenas. I conclude with observations and recommendations to build and strengthen the lattice work between these arenas, and prospects for creating a cross-cultural ethos to guide the purposes and practices of science.

A hybrid assignment, a research-based academic essay paired with a research-based weblog, incorporates elements from both personal and academic writing to challenge students to critically think about how and why they write privately and publically. Students writing into this new model of public discourse can experiment with stance and tone across genres to exercise their abilities as responsible and flexible writers.

Recognition demands our attention. As a “keyword,” its significance is measured in part simply by the number of times it appears across the pages of the works that occupy our desks. Claimed by political theorists, moral philosophers, cultural anthropologists, legal scholars, activists, historians, and rhetoricians (certainly there are others), recognition has become a workhorse for theorizing the ontological, epistemological, political, and ethical conditions and practices of intersubjectivity. Political theorists in the early 1990s popularized the term as a way to grasp how liberal democratic societies might negotiate, regulate, and promote multiculturalism. Reviving Hegel's account of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) in the Phenomenology of Spirit, they argued that individuals who fail to find themselves reflected in social norms and values, those who are silenced, erased, or illegible in the places they live, may become full members of a political community through the recognition of the value and worth of their identities. As Charles Taylor compellingly argues in his seminal article on the subject, “Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves” (1994, 25). Given that its absence can cause injury, Taylor reasons that recognition therefore “is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need” (26). Articulated in this way, recognition's appeal is undeniable: “It expresses an attractive ideal, envisioning a world in which people could all find their own identities accurately and respectfully reflected in the mirror of their shared social and political life” (Markell 2003, 3).Despite recognition's promise, critiques of multiculturalism expose the untenable foundations on which recognition is built. On Taylor's account of the politics of recognition, group rights, institutionalized in law, afford the respect and dignity demanded by those in need of recognition. Taylor himself toward the end of his article wonders whether rights should serve as the binding force for what might, in the end, be a moral problem: “Perhaps we don't need to ask whether it's something that others can demand from us as a right. We might simply ask whether this is the way we ought to approach others” (1994, 72). For political theorists and philosophers, the more immediate issue is how recognition might be institutionalized in a system of rights—how rights might serve as the mark of successful recognition. They demonstrate that within a liberal democratic framework grounded in individual rights, the politics of recognition requires law to accommodate what are essentially illiberal demands based on group identities. For some, the task is to show how group demands can be met within a system of rights—how demands for recognition of group identities are not in fact inconsistent with individual rights (see Kymlicka 1995). For theorists working within the paradigm of deliberative democracy, the task is to show how legal rights do not and cannot grant recognition once and for all. In these works, imagining the politics of recognition means refiguring it as both a continuing practice of public debate and a public norm rather than as an end in itself: “Recognition in theory and practice should not be seen as a telos or end state, but as a partial, provisional, mutual, and human-all-too-human part of continuous processes of democratic activity in which citizens struggle to change their rules of mutual recognition as they change themselves” (Tully 2000, 477). As a process that relies on contestation and the productive frenzy of debate, recognition does not signal for these theorists a singular act or event but rather an ongoing process, a deliberation over (the rules regulating) the terms of recognizability (see Habermas 1994). For Nancy Fraser in particular, recognition is best understood as a “folk paradigm”—a set of “linked assumptions about the causes of and remedies for injustice” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 11)—that provides reasons for why demands for recognition bind “all who agree to abide by fair terms of interaction under conditions of value pluralism” (31). What this reframing in critical scholarship exposes is that the multiculturalist ideal of a politics of recognition does not account for the conditions in which demands for recognition are met.Although this critique was prominent in early engagements with multiculturalism, much of the scholarship since has seized on the seemingly unbreakable bond of recognition and identity logics. Recognition, we learn, “rests on a simplified understanding of subject formation, identity and agency in the context of social hierarchy” (McNay 2008, 2). To detail the complexities lost in the presumptions of the politics of recognition, a virtual industry of scholarship has emerged. For some, the difficulty of such a politics is that it collapses individual and collective identities. K. Anthony Appiah argues, for instance, that recognition of group identities risks reproducing the violent, “tyrannical” relationship between dominant society and underrepresented groups in the relationship between an individual and the group with whom she identifies. Group identities produce “scripts”—“proper ways of being”—that suppress individual autonomy and difference in the name of earning and maintaining recognition (Appiah 1994, 162–63). For others, it is not the normative force of collective identities that renders recognition problematic but its attachment to identity in the first place. Patchen Markell shows that because identity appears as a “coherent self-description that can serve as the ground of agency, guiding or determining what we are to do” (2003, 36), the pursuit of recognition becomes synonymous with the pursuit of sovereignty. The result is that a politics of recognition invokes and fixes identity as a stable expression of who we are, misrecognizing the ways we exist in the middle of a politics that betrays the vulnerability of our autonomy and the instability of our becoming. Still others find recognition unworkable because it reinforces or bolsters existing structures of power, concealing the violence and oppression that play out in recognition's practice. Scholars locate this violence in different dimensions of recognition: in the way that it produces symbolic change rather than economic redistribution (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 12); in the way that it “diverts attention from the role of the powerful, of the misrecognizers, in these interactions, focusing on the consequences of suffering misrecognition rather than on the more fundamental question of what it means to commit it” (Markell 2003, 18); in the way it constitutes the colonial subject's consciousness (Fanon 1967); in the way that it, à la Hegel, entails a life-and-death struggle that is then somehow supposed to give way to “compassionate personal relations, ethical social relations, or democratic political relations” (Oliver 2001, 4).In the wake of these critiques, visions of a politics of recognition grounded in identity have given way to critical accounts that seek to recuperate or reimagine the foundations of our shared political or ethical life in other terms. Some scholars heuristically remove recognition from the political scene in an effort to think its possibilities and limits in different registers (see Butler 2005). Instead of being deployed as a norm intended to shape the landscape and relations of politics, the concept is employed as an analytic that might foster insight into the conditions in which subjectivity and ethical life emerge—reading for recognition's ontological and ethical implications. Other scholars, having seen what props up recognition, abandon the ideal altogether. Preferring to use concepts such as acknowledgment (Markell 2003; Hyde 2006), witnessing (Oliver 2001), or agency as embodied practice (McNay 2008), they investigate the possibility of an ethical intersubjectivity that can serve as a corrective to the violence or pathology of recognition.If the first critical body of literature attempts to determine a proper place for recognition—one we might anticipate and welcome—the second body of scholarship that seeks other normative ideals renders a judgment on recognition's significance and efficacy for understanding and intervening in the world. Given this vast body of scholarship, we begin to understand how the proliferation of work on recognition threatens to become, like a well-fed gremlin after midnight, monstrous. As Ricoeur remarks, “There must be a reason that no widely recognized philosophical work of high reputation has been published with the title Recognition” (2005, 1). Recognition appears across a variety of works as both the instrument of a more democratic and ethical life and as the ruse that allows us to believe we are free and equal—even as we become further subjected to structures of power that render us complicit with injustice. It is accorded “dual significance … as both a descriptive tool and a regulative idea” (McNay 2008, 2). It is both solution and problem. While the multiplicity of recognition's meanings, uses, and registers is itself not problematic, it does pose a problem of referentiality that threatens to make recognition into everything and nothing all at once. To study recognition, to read for its potential or its limits, is to pose the inevitable question: to what does recognition refer?This special issue does not set out to answer this question by fixing recognition's referent. Instead, it wagers that this question becomes a question for us, in part, because we have not yet fully understood how recognition entails or is imbricated with referentiality, meaning making, place making. In short, we have not yet fully understood the rhetorical conditions in which this question might be raised. The articles that follow set out to do this work. Authors were invited to critically examine recognition in its different forms and to define its rhetorical contours. Articulated in this way, the invitation asked authors to do more than offer thoughts on how rhetorical perspectives and acts of criticism might illuminate recognition—assuming that we might indeed be able to locate recognition and bring it to light. If we understand a contour as an outline—or, more precisely, as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it, as “an outline especially of a curving or irregular figure”—the task set out was to examine how the figuration of recognition (how its taking place as a commonplace) operates or is given form or shape in and through rhetoric. An investigation of the rhetorical contours of recognition encourages a consideration of how rhetoric acts to constitute, perform, represent, flesh out, and trouble forms of recognition, and so this issue suspends, if only for a short time, a judgment about the value of recognition in the context of legal, political, ethical, or theoretical controversies in order to probe its rhetorical conditions, practices, and power.Admittedly, this collection of articles might defy the expectations of its audience. For too long, the terms in and through which recognition has been addressed, theorized, and critiqued have been set in such a way that to raise the question of the rhetorical contours of recognition, to ask after the implications of its (theoretical) histories and deployments, and to question how these very terms have taken up a place in the narratives we tell about recognition means that what follows might be unfamiliar, even unrecognizable, as a “rhetoric of recognition.” Authors were invited, encouraged even, to invoke diverse definitions, traditions, and theorists of the term. As a result, the articles do not settle on or begin from a single definition of recognition, nor do they even all accept the commonplace treatment of recognition as a practice of intersubjectivity through which individuals are validated by those around them. Alongside the Fichtean and Hegelian concept of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) that drives discourses of multiculturalism and identity politics, the contributors also draw on the concept in both its Aristotelian form (anagnôrisis) and in the derivatives of its French form (reconnaître). In Aristotle's Poetics, anagnôrisis is the element of a plot structure that enables a shift from ignorance to knowledge. While lesser known than Aristotle's concept of reversal (peripeteia), anagnôrisis represents a recognition scene in which the author—somewhat artificially or shoddily, Terence Cave tells us—resolves the plot (as, for example, when Sophocles has Oedipus discover who he is). Importantly, though, the passage from ignorance to knowledge is “different from rational cognition. It operates surreptitiously, randomly, elliptically and often perversely, seizing on precisely those details that from a rational point of view seem trivial” (Cave 1990, 10). The French reconnaître, according to Ricoeur, has “three major senses”: to grasp something in thought; to accept something as true; and to “bear witness through gratitude that one is indebted to someone for” (2005, 12). Introducing these different forms of recognition into the collection unsettles the presumptions—about knowledge or recognition's scene, for example—that underwrite its well-known accounts, holding open the possibility of reflecting on the value of rhetoric for larger discourses on recognition.Read together, these articles then redefine what it means for recognition to be a “keyword.” Setting aside the question of the term's significance, they invite us to consider how recognition's word(s) permit(s) passage. That is, they allow us to explore how an understanding of the rhetorical conditions and practices of recognition move subjects, objects, scenes, and speech or transform them into something they were not already. They signal the need and desire to think about how recognition's practices are authorized in the constitution of its word(s). They imagine the various shapes recognition might take in order to open a view onto our shared life. They give us pause to ask onto what or through what recognition passes, illuminating the ways that the place of recognition has so very much to do with how recognition takes place.There is a conceptual movement, a shape, in the way these articles are organized; they themselves move and transform. One opens a set of questions that the next addresses or affirms or troubles—not in a seamless way, of course, but in a way that allows us to see how the contours of recognition appear in the (various) words about its words. Conceptually, the articles move us from a question of the language of recognition to its ethical implications for life, passing us onto its political scene and opening to a question of aesthetic experience. In the article that begins this collection, Erik Doxtader comments that “one irony of the ongoing debate over the relative merits of recognition is that it frequently turns (to) language only when it can be mustered and used as evidence for how competing positions unduly rely on the shifting and contingent—mere—nature of words.” Noting that contemporary discourses of recognition falter when they approach the question of language—even as recognition is staked out in terms of voice and speakability—he poses a question that several articles in the collection take up: “Does recognition assume language in a way that precludes the recognition of language?” For Doxtader, this question occasions a turn to Walter Benjamin's “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” which he draws on to explore in both content and form how Benjamin “grasps that the language of recognition may awaken in the recognizability of language.” Philippe-Joseph question to ask not about the recognizability of language but the recognizability of a on a of in the of the and of what it might to recognition to what shapes the of in the of to show that a into a the into a the into a the into a and is the of the concept For the of this and the of the turns on the way in which of the and are themselves articles that follow explore the ways insight into the rhetorical contours of recognition are by and the terms of life. questions whether the form of power that our attention and its of for understanding the of power in change political that the foundations of have to she the concept of as a way to think about how power operates in through the of the between life and in how more are being she argues that the for the recognition of the if it is to the of the for recognition of of the must the of rather than simply to into too with contemporary forms of the of life, to Hegel's life-and-death struggle in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that this struggle for recognition is … precisely because it the of a that can be staked and in a the of through To grasp how life in Hegel's work conditions recognition, between and we might and in Hegel's of and that for by and that appear to in the from to a life that is human and In a of life in Hegel's a form of recognition as a of knowledge that might be able to account ways that produces its own as the conditions of witnessing and to an grounded on our shared bond to our singular as a way to to of recognition that ground their ethical in the vulnerability of human life. are problematic for because they that the recognition of vulnerability to ethical relations that vulnerability a human subjectivity or Noting that is shared with she for a form of as ongoing and between and their cannot be to recognition, mutual or consideration of the of life opens onto an of the politics of recognition's scene and how it might bring about the and rhetorical implications of a concept he defines as of of in which an “an and of at with a to the work of and his details the way the to it as if were the one for whom it was able to the and social norms within the of and The value of then is that it a potential … to the and power of and as as to the that such and and examine the of the scene of in order to understand the possibilities for critique in political practices of recognition. theoretical accounts of legal recognition and outline the of that law is the or of the scene of recognition. an account of rhetorical is what is lost in political theoretical to a form of violence and injustice. that if we the relationship between law and recognition's scene, we are able to see how scene of recognition is set not by the law itself but by a demand for recognition in and through which both and law take details the rhetorical conditions of different of recognition, as to and of and to violence and point toward the that recognition is to article is to how as an politics, and in the are to recognition and how these critiques of and The possibility of this critique for in the to the dimensions of recognition in political and the between the of power within and across groups who are and liberal and of and takes on a scene of political recognition, the debate, it to the political potential of he various used to for rights in order to of as for recognition as that is as much an act of as it is of he that an understanding of the of might forms of knowledge and foster political across the article of the collection, how a language of recognition might to make of aesthetic the on and he a of aesthetic through which we to see that expresses a fundamental element of human and in so in the world to that significance of and of the to the politics of recognition the or the of in that it of over on the and aesthetic recognition point toward the need to the relationship between rhetoric and terms that a and yet If we accept that is the of the of in the world in and through and in then we are with and to the question of the of language in recognition in which the collection to all the authors who articles to this special to the in ways shape and life to the especially for the with and to by Erik Doxtader, and and for the work of who of their to offer to the like to for the to this collection and the he the

Modern readers have been baffled by the combination of legal, dramatic, and theological elements in the 14th century Processus Sathanae, a mock trial drama in which the devil's advocate and the Virgin Mary employ various Roman law concepts in a courtroom debate regarding the devil's claim that he was wrongfully dispossessed of humanity. This article examines the Processus Sathanae along with an early source of the drama in a Marcionite creation dialogue and argues that by foregrounding equitable and emotional appeals the drama taught late medieval law students important lessons regarding legal oratory during a crucial period in the development of European jurisprudence.

“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed and funded through a Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship at Michigan State University and presented as a digital poster at the Conference on Community Writing in October 2015.

Reviews Kathleen S. Lamp. A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome. South Carolina, 2013. 208 pp. ISBN 9781611172775 What is the relationship between rhetoric, both spoken and visual, and ci\'ic participation in Augustan Rome? A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome, attempts to address this question, beginning in the intro­ duction by examining Augustus' Famous assertion that he "entered Rome a city of brick and left it a citv of marble". The study goes on to examine how visual displays function themselves as a form of persuasion that, in Augustus' case, helped him to win and maintain power. Her argument is that Augustan culture was heavilv influenced bv rhetorical theory, which in turn "guided ci\ ic participation and rhetorical practice" (p. 5), and fur­ ther, that the synthesis of rhetoric to image and politics in so sweeping a manner was a central aspect of Augustus' accomplishment. The first chapter surveys Rome's "rhetorical situation" upon Augustus' assumption of sole command. One of the conundrums Augustus faced was how to maintain the goodwill of those he governed. Lamp asserts (p. 13) that Augustus' attempts to gain acceptance were rhetorical from the standpoint that "thev represented a tvpe of persuasive communication between the peo­ ple and the government about the workings of the state". A significant part of his rhetorical strategy7 was his reliance on various mythological traditions such as those of Aeneas, Romulus, and of the monarchy and its demise. Chapter two ("Seeing Rhetorical Theory") argues that the ancient theory of rhetoric broadened under the empire to include other literary genres beyond oratorv, including non-traditional forms of media not usually associated with rhetoric, including coins, monuments, and city planning. The chapter inclu­ des a good discussion of the relationship between the visual and memory in rhetorical theorists, focusing on Quintilian and Cicero who clearly associ­ ated the two, and who, in addition, addressed the role of monuments and urban spaces in creating collective public memory. The next chapter ("The Augustan Political Myth") builds on the first two, and starts with a close examination of the Ara Pads as a piece of Augustan rhetoric, examining how it constructed myth and memory in Augustan Rome. She argues that the altar used conventions of rhetoric that were roughly analogous to those expounded in the rhetorical theories of Cicero and Quintilian with a view to addressing its audience. Chapter four Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIII, Issue 4, pp. 431-442. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. C 2016 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.php7p—reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.2015.33.4.431. 432 RHETORICA ("Let Us Now Praise Great Men") similarly examines the Forum of Augustus and its rhetorical function; the chapter begins with a discussion of Isocrates theory of rhetoric that argued against the use of visual media or static representative forms of rhetoric, such as statuary. Of course, this is precisely what Augustus' forum was - a monument that employed a permanent, visual record intended to educate the audience in a particular set of values with a view to imitation, something that had a long-standing tradition in Rome, particularly with the use of funerary images. The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of how the rhetoric of the forum itself parallels its function as an administrative and judicial center where oratory would be practiced. Lamp then turns in chapter five ("Coins, Material Rhetoric, and Circu­ lation") to the dissemination of the Augustan political myth. She traces, via the numismatic record, the creation of that myth, but further argues that it evolved over time, noting that the coins issued at the end of his reign indi­ cate a popular acceptance of that myth. She focuses on three aspects of Augustus' program prior to 13 BC: pietas, succession, and the trifecta of peace, victory, and prosperity. In the numismatic record after 9 BC we find emblems designed to emphasize Augustus' pietas and his role as poutifex maximus, while she notes that prior to...

Reviews 437 proposta d identificazione dell autore di questa declamazione con uno dei piu importanti maestri di retorica del tempo: Mario Vittorino. Conformemente ai criteri delle Edizioni dell'Universita di Cassino, entrambi i volumi propongono delle traduzioni che combinano felicemente limpidezza espressiva e riproduzione delle peculiaritá dello stile declamato­ rio, spesso aspro ed ellittico. Entrambi propongono poi un apparato biblio­ gráfico ricco e di grande ntilita, aggiornato al 2013. Si tratta nel complesso di due opere che riescono a coniugare con grande armonía la ricchezza e profonditá del commento filológico con una puntúale trattazione e contestualizzazione anche di problematiche di carattere piu generale. L'argomentazione e sempre esaustiva e di grande chiarezza . Grazie a queste doti tanto il Matheniaticus curato da Stramaglia, quanto il Sepulcnini incantation curato da Schneider risultano al tempo stesso un prezioso strumento di lavoro per gli specialisti e un valido mezzo di diffusione delle declamazioni presso un pubblico studentesco purtroppo ancora raramente sensibilizzato verso questo tipo di testi. Ai i ssandra Rolle, Université de Lausanne James Crosswhite, Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 424. Cloth $105.00, paper $35.00 ISBhf(paper) 9780226016481 There is a narrative that portrays rhetoric as an often-maligned theory of human discourse, educational regime, and practice. It is a superficial narra­ tive that has been under increasing assault since the new rhetoric's birth dur­ ing the 1920s and 30s. I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke began the revision with novel conceptions of rhetoric as a social practice; Richard McKeon, Henry W. Johnstone, Ch. Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Ernesto Grassi advanced it in mid-century with reflections on rhetoric as at the core of philosophy (or philosophy of a certain sort); by late century John Poulakos and Takis Poulakos, among others, were rebuffing the subjugation of rhetoric to philosophy with an aesthetic interpretation based on a recuperation of the elder sophists' vision; and in this century scholars such as Diane Davis and Thomas Rickert continue the assault with formulations that carry rhetoric beyond the human and into such domains as the ambience of materiality. Although these thinkers conceptualize the new rhetoric from divergent start­ ing points and in different frames, they share a common desire to disclose what lies beneath a facile rendition of rhetoric as mere persuasion, namely its abiding centrality to what makes us human. This is the animus of James Crosswhite's Deep Rhetoric. Beginning with the observation that "we are rhe­ torical beings, and through rhetoric we give ways of being to each other and receive them from each other" (p. 17), Crosswhite seeks to understand how ordinary rhetoric, whereby we seek to influence and provide direction, assu­ mes a world with "dimensions of rhetoric that allow individuals, societies, 438 RHETORICA human activities, and the world itself to take place—and so brings the very possibility of philosophy and science into its realm" (p. 17). This is the realm of deep rhetoric, a realm that plumbs the depth of what makes us human and aligns with a transcendent aspiration of the new rhetoricians that by striving to understand rhetoric as an intellectual, educational, political, and social pur­ suit we will come to better understand the human condition. Deep Rhetoric has as its subtitle a list of terms that serve as its organizing discussions: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. These are not ran­ dom choices. At its core, Crosswhite's book is concerned with the central problem that has been to the fore of rhetorical thought since World War I: overcoming through public argument the quest by power to gain a monopoly on violence and to use its monopoly to dominate others. Deep Rhetoric seeks a worldly stance open to and that opens the possibihty for transcending the narrow logoi of instrumental rationality, logoi constituting the calculus of a system logic that dehumanizes others by excluding those dimensions of pathos and ethos that make humanity and community possible. The book opens with a consideration of what deep rhetoric means. Crosswhite draws contrasts between historicist views that position rhetoric in terms of its origins at a specific time and under specific conditions, such as...

Modern readers have been baffled by the combination of legal, dramatic, and theological elements in the 14th century Processus Sathanae, a mock trial drama in which the devil’s advocate and the Virgin Mary employ various Roman law concepts in a courtroom debate regarding the devil’s claim that he was wrongfully dispossessed of humanity. This article examines the Processus Sathanae along with an early source of the drama in a Marcionite creation dialogue and argues that by foregrounding equitable and emotional appeals the drama taught late medieval law students important lessons regarding legal oratory during a crucial period in the development of European jurisprudence.

ABSTRACT In public debates there are occasions on which persons might feel obligated to show disrespect in order to preserve integrity. In some public discourses (like those between evolutionists and creationists) interlocutors often show disrespect by “writing off” one another's reasons in an attempt to defend and preserve their own particular beliefs. To make better sense of the apparent discomfiture of intuitions concerning the connections between respect and integrity in such public confrontations, an “other-words orientation” to communication is proposed. The other-words orientation requires that individuals “stand for something” but in a way that respects one's opposition as the living, breathing, reason-giving entities they are. The ancient art of double argument is central to this endeavor.

Adding to the ongoing reconsideration of nineteenth-century oratorical theory, this essay recovers an influential evangelical theory and method of extemporaneous delivery that contributed to the rise of extemporaneous speech in America. The “inspiration of delivery,” articulated by Southern Baptist homiletician John A. Broadus in his 1870 preaching manual, posits a process of ongoing invention during extemporaneous delivery. Although it works to accomplish evangelical purposes, Broadus’ theory of delivery is a primarily secular synthesis of the classical canon of delivery with naturalistic elocutionary theory. Through its wide and persistent circulation, this theory of delivery continues to shape American expectations for performing authenticity in public oratory.