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3992 articlesApril 2022
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Abstract
Predatory publishers deliver neither the editorial oversight, nor the peer review of legitimate publishers, and benefit from those whose positions require academic publications. These publishers also provide a home for conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience promoters, as their lack of scrutiny offers fraudulent academic research articles a veneer of scholarly credibility. While most predatory journals were designed to dupe researchers, the fraudulent articles they often publish are designed to be found by members of the public, and their accessibility ensures that unlike legitimate research, they are likely to be employed as evidence by those seeking evidence. While studies have examined the common features of predatory journals, their emails, and their websites, this essay situates fraudulent academic articles in posttruth discourse, offers a taxonomy of illegitimate research articles, and highlights their common rhetorical features, in the hopes that the concepts discovered here can further contribute to pedagogy and public understanding.
March 2022
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The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine & Resistance is a critical contribution to the field of rhetoric and composition. Chvez's book demonstrates queer coalitional work as it examines heteronormative cistems of oppression that have disempowered and marginalized migrant bodies and folks of color since the early AIDS epidemic. 1 However, before engaging with Chvez's work, it is important to note that Ryan Mitchell, Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, has also written a review about this book. In his review, Mitchell provides a strong account about the parallels to current events, as well as articulating Chvez's ability to add to archival histories by "shifting focus from the work accomplished by mostly white, mostly middle class, cosmopolitan AIDS activist groups . . . . [and] draw[ing] from queer of color, migrant, and feminist traditions to recover an alternative history of AIDS, one that is attuned to how the epidemic affected (and continues to affect) those on the borders of civic and national belonging. " As Mitchell illuminates, Chvez's work adds to archival work by amplifying a historical perspective that captures racialized migrant bodies and moves away from centering White bodies, organizations, and perspectives. Building from Mitchell, I also see this book queering heteronormative institutionalized cistems of oppression to signify white supremacy's dominance and its violence against marginalized, disempowered, and ignored bodies. 2 As my review suggests, this text argumentatively informs readers about perspectives, identities, and literacies that are not often discussed in dominant heteronormative educational and archival scholarship.
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Review of: Diagnosing Madness: The Discursive Construction of the Psychiatric Patient, 1850–1920. Cristina Hanganu-Bresch and Carol Berkenkotter. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 192 pages, $49.99 paperback, $49.99 e-book. Publisher webpage: https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2019/6025.html
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Review of: You’re Doing It Wrong!: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise. Bethany L. Johnson & Margaret M. Quinlan. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 259 pages, $29.95 paperback, $99.95 cloth, $29.95 PDF, $29.95 EPUB. Publisher webpage: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/youre-doing-it-wrong/9780813593784
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Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work: Theories, Methodologies, and Pedagogies: Rebecca Walton and Godwin Y. Agboka: [Book Review] ↗
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This book is appropriate for technical and professional communication (TPC) teachers, scholars, and practitioners who wish to enact social justice in their work. Although our field has welcomed and cultivated the social justice turn enthusiastically for the last few decades, the editors acknowledge that “there is a dearth of praxis-based resources.” To address this need, this book offers “action-focused resources and tools,” which are intended to support members of the profession “in conducting research or pursuing both local and international projects in socially just ways.” To meet the needs of TPC scholars, practitioners, and teachers, the editors organized this book into four sections, consisting of three chapters each. Each chapter presents one social justice tool and a case to illustrate the effective use of that tool. Besides, each chapter presents tips, cautions, limitations, and future directions to inform the use of the resource. This book is extremely helpful because it inspires us to come up with more praxis-based resources, prioritize and learn from marginalized populations, and focus on embodied experiences and knowledges in our TPC practice, research, and pedagogy. Throughout the book, the authors remind us to be mindful of our own positionality, privilege, and power while doing TPC research, practice, and teaching and to empower the disempowered. This book can be an invaluable addition to courses in TPC research methods, field methods, Indigenous rhetorics, or pedagogy.
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Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students: Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson, and Norah Fahim: [Book Review] ↗
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This book offers college writing instructors strategies for creating linguistically diverse classrooms. Building on theories of language that multilingualism is a student’s strength not a deficit, the book will help faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants design lessons, courses, professional development opportunities, and writing center programs that support multilingual students and challenge notions that success on US campuses requires strict adherence to communicating in Standard Academic English (SAE). Through a highly engaging series of studies, the authors in this collection provide evidence that their approaches strengthen their writing pedagogies and empower their students. Although this book is primarily addressed to writing instructors, it may have some utility for professional communicators in industry. The rhetorical listening framework outlined in Chapter 10 would support in-house training on communicating across differences. The editors note that their work on the collection occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, another relevant context emerged that is not addressed in the book explicitly. Following now-revoked Executive Order 13950, more than half of US states have enacted or are debating laws that would restrict classroom and professional development training around issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. These laws may affect state-funded universities in ways that limit educators’ ability to enact the pedagogies described in this collection.
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Reviewed by: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Sarah Walden Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 In Lives, Letters, and Qailts, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan argues for the value of “everyday rhetorics of resistance” or “the conscious, purposeful recontextualization of the seemingly ordinary means and materials available in order to mediate thought and action, and to persuade others” (3). She examines three women or groups of women who demonstrate the power of persistent, everyday acts that recontextualize the means available to them in a particular time, place, and space. Throughout the book Sohan emphasizes two key arguments. First, she argues for the importance of a translingual and transmodal framework in order to avoid oversimplifying language, to understand difference as the norm, to “recover and reclaim the ways individual composers recontextualize within and across languages, genres, modes, and media,” and to adopt “more democratic and descriptive approaches to language” (9). Sohan’s second key argument involves the need to expand what counts as rhetoric, to redefine resistance, and to reframe how scholars situate rhetors who do not necessarily fit within the typical heroic narratives. For example, when Sohan discusses the ministry of Eliza P. Gurney, she describes the legend that one of Gurney’s letters was in President Abraham Lincoln’s breast pocket the night he was assassinated. She writes, in one of the most powerful lines of the book, that this myth serves as “a reminder of how a powerful, feminist rhetorical figure can be pigeonholed and, as a result, remain hidden in plain sight, because her rhetorical practice is evaluated solely in relation to the men with whom she came in contact, rather than on its own merit” (70-71). Sohan’s commitment to feminist rhetorical scholarship is clear throughout the book as she works to articulate and examine the everyday rhetoric available to women and to argue for its value as a site of study. In chapter one, Sohan explores the letter-writing campaigns of the Townsend Movement, a populist movement that advocated pension reform for the elderly by establishing local clubs that could organize and promote the plan through letter-writing campaigns, voter-registration drives, and petitions. These clubs promoted literacy through workshopping letter-writing, which allowed members to “collaboratively imagine” their future without financial worries (41). Pearl Buckhalter, president of the Oregon [End Page 209] City, Oregon, Townsend Club No. 1, is an example of a leader who recontextualized the means available to position herself as an expert, using her own experience as her ethos, rather than simply repeating the words prescribed by Townsend headquarters (52). Sohan argues convincingly that the translingual and transmodal literacy practices of the Townsend Movement allowed individuals like Buckhalter to transform their lives through the literacy training they receive as part of their activism, even if the movement they promote ultimately fails, as the Townsend Movement did. Nevertheless, she argues, this is exactly why rhetorical scholars must fight against the impulse to examine only heroic narratives of activism and must include the everyday in their analyses. In chapter two, Sohan examines the life and work of Quaker minister and activist Eliza P. Gurney. Gurney, Sohan argues, skillfully blends the epideictic form of classical rhetoric with the “nondirective, nonconfrontational, conversational rhetorical approach” of the Quaker community (71-72). Sohan examines several key parts of her ministry: her development as a minister, her traveling ministry in Europe, and her relationship with President Lincoln. Sohan argues that Gurney harnessed silence and kairos to establish an ethos with potentially hostile audiences, at a time when ethos was assumed to be more fixed than fluid. In her discussion of Gurney’s meeting and correspondence with Lincoln, Sohan demonstrates how Gurney recontextualized the epideictic to develop a relationship with the president and to plead with him to imagine a more peaceful and just world. In this chapter, Sohan significantly builds on prior scholarship on Gurney to establish her as a skillful activist and rhetorician through a detailed exploration of Gurney’s speeches, letters, and meetings. Chapter three is perhaps...
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Reviewed by: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry by Irene Peirano Garrison Michele Kennerly Irene Peirano Garrison. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-21935-5 In our free-verse universe, poetry only seems unbound; every so often, it is invoked precisely because it cannot shake common knowledge of its traditional formal and affective structures. For instance, in the 1980s, New York governor Mario Cuomo distinguished courtship from leadership with his quip “you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton used the line against Barack Obama, attempting to call into question his ability to pivot from charming to commanding. In 2020, then California senator Kamala Harris, interviewed while seeking her party’s nomination for the presidency, explained that policy proposals have “to be relevant,” not “a beautiful sonnet,” suggesting form can come at the expense of function. These examples show how orators operating in a tricky rhetorical culture use poetry and prose to differentiate modes of influence. They are part of a lengthy lineage. In Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, classicist Irene Peirano Garrison makes what is not the first case but what may be the fullest that distinctions posited between ancient poetry and oratory, verse and talk, poetics and rhetoric, are not fixed and absolute but strategic and contested. What is at stake in the making of those distinctions? That is an important question to ask of any time period, but Peirano Garrison s focus on Rome’s early imperial period sets her up to oppose what for a long time was prevailing scholarly opinion: that, during that period, the purity of poetry was adulterated by rhetoric, with Ovid being the first faulty filter. Peirano Garrison challenges the logic (and imagery) of that opinion, arguing that the very assumption that poetry and rhetoric were ever self-evidently [End Page 211] discrete and separate is not supported by the ancient evidence. To make her case, Peirano Garrison partitions that evidence into three sections: 1) Poetry in Rhetoric; 2) Oratory in Epic; 3) “Rhetoricizing” Poetry. A short introduction offers operative definitions of a few key terms. The first part begins with the chapter “Poetry and Rhetoric and Poetry in Rhetoric,” in which Peirano Garrison stretches from Gorgias to Derrida to take the long view of purported disassociations, connections, and interrelations between the two verbal arts. Pinpointing imperial Rome, she identifies eloquentia and facundia as terms for capacities of powerful and fluent speech that accommodate both orators and poets. It is precisely because they share in those capacities that orators and poets pursue and argue about who does what better under their respective constraints. The remainder of the chapter spotlights pleasure (voluptas), showiness (ostentatio), and enhancement (ornatus), since debates about the closeness of poetry and oratory tend to bunch around those concepts. The second chapter, “Poetry and the Poetic in Seneca the Elder’s Controuersiae and Suasoriaeseeks to understand and then correct the misguided view—in Seneca’s time and now, to the degree that anyone still clings to it—that the popularity of declamation in the early imperial period indexes its broken (that is, poeticized) rhetorical culture. Garrison focuses on how Seneca, himself from Spain, vaunts a Spanish orator (Porcius Latro) over an ostensibly eastern orator (Arellius Fuscus), because Latro instructs in what an uncorrupt, properly Roman oratorical style should sound like. Whereas Fuscus’s concoctions are bad imitations of good poets, Latro’s controlled persuasions render him so exemplary a speaker that Ovid and Vergil emulate him in their verse (74). “The Orator and the Poet in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria,” the final chapter in this section, ranges across the Institutio but dwells on book-rolls 8, 9, 10, and 12, since it is there that Quintilian most explicitly erects boundaries between poetry and oratory, even while he quotes and borrows extensively from Vergil to specify an orator’s unique training and trajectory. In this first part of the book, readers may notice Peirano Garrison’s unflagged (and frequent) use of the word “prose” in her discussions and translations. It seems important, even helpful, to her...
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Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard ↗
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Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...
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Review of "Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms edited by Christopher Scott Wyatt and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss," Wyatt, C. S., & DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.). (2018). <i>Type matters: The rhetoricity of letterforms</i> . Parlor Press. ↗
Abstract
Understanding the characteristics of letters---their names, sounds, relations to the other letters, and shapes (aka letterforms)---is at one point in our lives so new that we need elaborate learning aids. But, after decades of reading and writing, letterforms become nearly invisible to most people, despite our daily use of text. Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms challenges that invisibility.
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Review of "Composition and Big Data edited by Amanda Licastro and Benjamin Miller," Licastro, A. & Miller, B. (Eds.). (2021). <i>Composition and big data</i> . University of Pittsburg Press. ↗
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The evolution of digital tools and platforms has ushered in new possibilities for researchers, scholars, and practitioners of rhetoric and composition and adjacent fields like technical communication. These technologies change the ways we can gather, store, and use larger datasets, prompting new discussions on what big data methods look like in the field. The chapters housed in Amanda Licastro and Benjamin Miller's edited collection Composition and Big Data investigate the promises, concerns, and areas for further conversation regarding the applications of big data methods in composition-focused research.
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Review of "Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson," Ridolfo, J., & W. Hart-Davidson. (2019.) <i>Rhet ops: Rhetoric and information warfare</i> . University of Pittsburgh Press. ↗
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Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare provides a timely set of perspectives on the intersections of digital rhetoric and militarized operations conducted to foment or curtail violence. Rhet ops, shorthand for rhetorical operations, refers to the use of rhetorical theory by state or non-state actors to carry out coordinated military actions (operations). Perennial questions about rhetoric, ethics, and technical and digital communication (i.e., Katz, 1992; Lanham, 1993; Ward, 2014) inform 16 chapters by practitioners and academics who provide analytical and practical insights into "what it means to learn the art of rhetoric as a means to engage adversaries in war and conflict" (Ridolfo & Hart-Davidson, p. viii, emphasis in original). Rhet Ops' focuses on "the dark side of digital composing" (Ridolfo & Hart-Davidson, p. 3, emphasis in original)---from GamerGate to ISIS to the seemingly benign digital interfaces we interact with every day---making it especially salient in a time when violence and rhetoric intertwine constantly. Further, editors Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson have curated examples of #RhetOps on Twitter for years which fosters indefinite public tracking of #RhetOps, a move toward accountability.
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Preview this article: Review: Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/49/3/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege31806-1.gif
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Preview this article: Review: Feminist Rhetorical Challenges to Significance, Certainty, and Disconnection, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/84/4/collegeenglish31770-1.gif
February 2022
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“ Editors’ Introduction: Finding Humanity and Community in Pandemic Scholarship ” | Jessica Pauszek & Steve Parks “Asian/American Movements Through the Pandemic and Through the Discipline Before, During, and After COVID-19” | Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, and K. Hyoejin Yoon “Cultivating Empathy on the Eve of a Pandemic” | Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Tamara Dean, Rachel Alsbury, Julia Buskirk, Margot Higgins, Eloise Johnson, Sharon Koretskov, Brad Steinmetz, Emma Waldinger, Samuel Wood, Carl Zuleger “Rerouting Place in Community-Engaged Teaching: Lessons from the Spatial Disruption of COVID-19” | Charles N. Lesh & Kevin G. Smith “COVID-19, International Partnerships, and the Possibility of Equity: Enhancing Digital Literacy in Rural Nepal amid a Pandemic” | Sweta Baniya, Kylie Call, Ashley Brein, Ravi Kumar “More Than Paper Islands: The Pandemic Circuitry of Quaranzines” | Jason Luther “Community Literacy as Justice Entrepreneurship: Envisioning the Progressive Potential of Entrepreneurship in a Post-Covid Field” | Paul Feigenbaum, Ben Lauren, & Dànielle Nicole Devoss “Embracing Disruption: A Framework for Trauma-informed Reflective Pedagogy “ | Jennifer Eidum “ISU Quarantine Journal Project: Reflective Writing, Public Memory, and Community Building in Extraordinary Times” | Lesley Erin Bartlett and Laura Michael Brown “Writing Historical Fiction Online: Community Digital Literacies in Regional Australia” | Sophie Masson, Lynette Aspey, Ariella Van Luyn “Inclusive and Meaningful Considerations of Failure: A Review of Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail edited by Allison D. Carr and Laura R. Micciche” | Whitney Jordan Adams “Review: Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah” | Megan McCool Editorial Team Steve Parks & Jessica Pauszek | Co-Editors Heather Lang | Web Editor Trenton McKay Judson | Assistant Editor Romeo García | Book Review Editor Tori Scholz | Copy Editor
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Book Review: Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail, edited by Allison D. Carr and Laura R. Micciche ↗
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Failure, as rendered by a straightforward Google search, is defined quite simply as a “lack of success.” Despite this seemingly simple definition, failure, and failure as explicated within the realm of pedagogy, is much more complex, working within varied situations, subtexts, and power structures. This nuanced analysis of failure is explored with dynamism throughout the… Continue reading Book Review: Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail, edited by Allison D. Carr and Laura R. Micciche
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Book Review: Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah ↗
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Service projects or community partnerships? Charity work or reciprocal collaboration? Those participating in community-university collaborations, intellectual partnerships between university affiliated researchers and those outside of universities, have long troubled the ways that this work can be—and is—ethically fraught, messy, and risky. One common suggestion for working against these issues, on the other hand, is to… Continue reading Book Review: Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah
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Review: <i>Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016</i>, by Tammy R. Vigil ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016, by Tammy R. Vigil Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 Sara Hillin Sara Hillin Lamar University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sara Hillin; Review: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016, by Tammy R. Vigil. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.100 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach</i>, by Alessandro Vatri ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach, by Alessandro Vatri Alessandro Vatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vasiliki Zali-Schiel Vasiliki Zali-Schiel University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 96–98. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.96 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Vasiliki Zali-Schiel; Review: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach, by Alessandro Vatri. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 96–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.96 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics</i>, by Michele Kennerly ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, by Michele Kennerly Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 David L. Marshall David L. Marshall University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 91–94. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.91 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation David L. Marshall; Review: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, by Michele Kennerly. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 91–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.91 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 Denise Stodola Denise Stodola Kettering University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 98–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Denise Stodola; Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 98–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend</i>, by T. J. Keeline ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend, by T. J. Keeline T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Martin T. Dinter Martin T. Dinter King’s College London Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.90 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Martin T. Dinter; Review: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend, by T. J. Keeline. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 90–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.90 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, by Susan Jarratt Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Anna Peterson Anna Peterson Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 103–105. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.103 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anna Peterson; Review: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, by Susan Jarratt. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 103–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.103 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Review: <i>Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics</i>, by Olga V. Solovieva ↗
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Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, by Olga V. Solovieva Olga V. Solovieva, Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780810136007 Mark Clavier Mark Clavier Brecon Cathedral Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 88–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.88 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Clavier; Review: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, by Olga V. Solovieva. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 88–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.88 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Written composition has long been regarded as a cognitively challenging task. It simultaneously makes significant demands on language, memory, and thinking. For lengthy compositions, the writing process entails multiple work sessions extending over days, weeks, months, and even years. The diligence required can be challenging emotionally as well as cognitively. At the heart of meeting these demands is the capacity for self-regulation. Not surprisingly, then, the psychological research on executive functions has much to say about writing skill-both its successes and failures.
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A Social-Constructionist Review of Feedback and Revision Research: How Perceptions of Written Feedback Might Influence Understandings of Revision Processes ↗
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This social-constructionist review of research illuminates the ways in which feedback, reflection, and revision are all inherently relational processes. Research suggests that university students’ perceptions of feedback shape their revision processes, though it appears that their preferred types of feedback may not always lead them to make effective revisions.
January 2022
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Where Did the Rhetoric of Science Go? A Double Review of Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science, Case Studies and Issues and Methods, a Two Volume Edited Collection by Randy Harris. ↗
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In this review essay, we look back at the evolution of the rhetoric of science by reviewing the&nbsp;Case Studies&nbsp;and&nbsp;Issues and Methods&nbsp;volumes edited by Randy Harris. We conclude by reflecting on the past, present, and future of the discipline.
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Book Review - Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell ↗
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020 was an unprecedented year for the entire world but more so for the US, where COVID-19 killed far more people than in any other country and caused widespread unemployment, food insecurity, and homelessness. What is more striking is the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minority, immigrant, and low-income populations. These disparities question the notion of post-racial America and call for a long and difficult journey toward social justice. Moreover, 2020 will also be remembered as a year of inflammatory political rhetorics, extreme polarization, and racial tensions. Recurrent deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement resulted in protests and riots across the country. Published during such tumultuous times, April Baker-Bell's 2020 monograph, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, shows how language and racism are intertwined, makes a strong case against the anti-Black linguistic racism affecting millions of lives both inside and outside the classroom, and offers an Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy as a way to deal with linguistic injustice. Throughout the book Baker-Bell introduces Black Language Artifacts as a part of the antiracist pedagogy where Black experience and Black culture are used as a resource for learning. Bringing together theory, history, culture, pedagogy and activism, Baker-Bell aligns with the mission of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and calls for action to create classrooms where Black students' linguistic and cultural resources are valued and imagines a world without anti-blackness, where another George Floyd doesn't get killed despite his repeated plea-"I cannot breathe"-in "Standardized American English. "
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beginning of a new chapter in composition studies,
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Reviewed by: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach by AlessandroVatri Vasiliki Zali-Schiel AlessandroVatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vatri has produced a well-researched book that helpfully and skilfully marries the cultural-historical and the linguistic character of his work. The excellent use and review of scholarship enables Vatri to achieve the purpose of the book, which is to examine, with the help of modem psycholinguistics, whether there is any linguistic difference between classical Attic prose texts intended for public oral delivery and those intended for written circulation and private performance. The book starts with a thorough discussion of the complicated relationship between oral and written style (Chapter 1). The medium alone is not a decisive divisive factor because there is a great variety of communicative situations and priorities one needs to take into consideration even when the same medium is used. And this is indeed the case with Attic prose, where we cannot clearly distinguish between “literally” oral and written texts. However, the distinction between a written and a non-written conception can be traced very early in the development of ancient Greek stylistic theory (e.g., Alcidamas, Isocrates, Aristotle). For example, Isocrates in his Philip clearly marks the difference between speeches meant to be read and those meant to be delivered: those meant to be read may not be timely, hence their persuasive ability is compromised. Speeches for reading may also not manage to persuade the listeners because they may not be successfully delivered by the reader. This affects the reception of a text and changes the emphasis of the distinction between writtenness and non-writtenness from composition to performance. [End Page 96] Chapter 2 turns to contexts of reception. In classical Athens, close scrutiny of prose texts was possible in solitary and private group reading (“off-line” perusal) but not in situations whose norms of interaction excluded this possibility, such as public oratorical performances and semi-formal small- scale epideixeis. In such public competitive contexts, there was no room for anything but clarity (saphēneia) to convince an audience unable to revisit the text (“on-line” reception). Public texts could therefore not afford obscurity of expression by contrast to private texts (“where off-line perusal is possible, there is no need to take excessive pains to ensure the optimal on-line comprehension of a text,” 35). Hence, the different contexts of reception may be associated with linguistic difference. In Chapter 3, Vatri looks at the distinction between texts that were meant for off-line perusal/reception (scriptures) and those meant for on-line reception (scripts). The writing of Attic prose texts was quite a complex process, with several oral stages—and plausibly even oral composition— preceding written dissemination. But there were also revisions of publicly delivered texts (scripts), such as deliberative and forensic speeches, after their performance and often for the purpose of making a new version of the text public through written dissemination. After examining literacy and reading in classical Athens, Vatri determines the conception of written prose texts as scripts or scriptures proceeding on a genre-by-genre basis. Chapter 4 focuses on clarity (saphēneia), which was extremely important for texts meant for on-line reception (scripts) and especially so for public speeches in particular. The centrality of clarity of expression is already highlighted in ancient Greek rhetorical literature. For “Demetrius” (for example), clarity and familiarity are key to persuasiveness; persuasiveness and clarity can be achieved through plain style—an idea that can be traced back to the criticism of Aeschylus’ obscure language in Aristophanes’ Frogs. According to “Demetrius,” plain style is distinguished not only by its clarity but also by a vividness generated by precision (aknbeia). Both Aristotle and Isocrates consider precision an important feature of texts meant for reading, which may also generate saphēneia. Vatri then looks closely at a range of examples from ancient Greek rhetorical literature to examine what they say about the rhetorical devices employed to produce saphēneia. A recurrent issue in ancient discussions is ambiguity, which can be generated by vocabulary (e.g., ambiguous character of certain...
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Reviewed by: L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi by Laurent Pernot Mike Edwards Laurent Pernot, L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi. Paris: Fayard, 2018. 334 pp. ISBN: 9782213706054 In July 2008, on behalf of Laurent Pemot, I represented the International Society for the History of Rhetoric at The First Biennial Conference of the Chinese Rhetoric Society of the World. Since this global event was scheduled to take place less than a month before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, my first idea was to give a paper on ancient Olympic speeches. On second thoughts, I realized that talking about the content of Lysias 33, with its proposed attack on the despotic rulers of Persia and Syracuse, might be taken as a veiled reference to China’s socialist democracy—a sous-entendu. Twelve years later, with the Tokyo Olympics postponed because of a threat allegedly emanating from Japan’s old foe, I find myself reviewing a book written by Pemot that will become a standard work on the art of innuendo. Pemot covers an extensive range of material from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present, to which this review cannot hope to do justice, with examples drawn from rhetorical works, other genres of literature, and elsewhere. Thus, in chapter 1 Pemot discusses types of sous-entendu (as often, the French word is best) in daily life, with politeness such as “you shouldn’t have” to mean “thank you” for a gift. There is an understandable French bias throughout, but Pemot’s versatility is indicated by analyses of authors such as George Orwell, Boualem Sansal, and Arthur Miller. Other topics include politics (the subtle war of words between Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand in 1974); fables and riddles (the Sphinx, naturally, but also Jean Paulhan with his translations of enigmatic Malagasy poetry); and conspiracy theory (such as Kennedy, Coluche, the Da Vinci Code). An excellent opening. Sous-entendu in the ancient world is the subject of chapter 2, where Pemot discusses the unsettled place of figured speech in rhetorical theory, and the frequently difficult relationships in declamation between fathers and sons that led to ambiguous remarks like “I married the woman who [End Page 94] pleased my father” (57). Pernot returns to antiquity in a very strong chapter 5 that examines how Greek authors represented Rome with figured speech. Here, on his specialist research terrain, he offers perceptive discussions of Dio Chrysostom’s On Kingship (cf. the much earlier treatment of the theme in Isocrates) and Aelius Aristides’ To Rome, highlighting the latter’s numerous significant omissions, not least of the word “Rome” itself (similarly, the story of Paul Valéry’s grudging eulogy of his illustrious predecessor in the Académie française, Anatole France, in which he managed to avoid using the name “Francé” in reference to his subject, is a little gem). Among the interesting topics of chapter 3 is connotation, as in publicity slogans like “Tendre est la nuit à bord du France” (69), which for Pernot might recall a line of Keats, a novel of Scott Fitzgerald, a film of Henry King or a song by Jackson Browne (yes: type “tender is the night” into Google). Analysis of literary critics (Barthes, Luc Fraisse, William Empson, Roger Callois) and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, with its expression mise en abyme, contributes to another excellent chapter. In chapter 4 Pernot turns to the risks attached to interpretation, especially when an unintended (often sexual) message is received. In the theatre this may be designed to cause laughter (Much Ado About Nothing), but there is nothing funny about De Clerambault’s Syndrome (erotomania). Pemot’s discussion references Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, but it made me think of Play Misty for Me. Arbeit macht frei? In chapter 6 Pernot turns to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, focusing on the intellectual resistance to the Nazis of Louis Aragon in a poetic method he called “contrabande.” How could such works have escaped the censor (not all did)? One way was the use of historical parallels, as with Jules Isaac’s Les Oligarques and its analogy between ancient Athens under the Thirty and the German Occupation...
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Reviewed by: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt Anna Peterson Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Coined by Philostratus in the early third century CE, the label “Second Sophistic” (c. 50-250 CE) is increasingly recognized as an imperfect periodic designation. Does it refer exclusively to the tradition of epideictic rhetoric as described by Philostratus? Or can it be expanded to include the full range of Greek literary production during the first three centuries CE? At its core the term reflects feelings of belatedness and nostalgia, such that the common narrative of the period has become one in which an elite Hellenic identity was defined above all by paideia (“education” or “culture”). While this rooting of an elite Greek identity in the classical past is well recognized as a response to Roman hegemony,1 recent scholarship has begun to expand on this conventional view, pointing to elements of continuity both with earlier Hellenistic literature and the literature of the fourth century CE.2 Jarratt’s monograph Chain of Gold consequently sets a tall task for itself in once again addressing the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, even if in the end it does not completely succeed in what it sets out to do. At its core, it argues for a reappraisal of the “second sophistic habit of dwelling in the past” as something that was not “monologic and static” but “varied and dynamic” and that offered the writers and performers of the period “a politically protected way of ‘talking back’ to empire.” (17) For Jarratt, the obsession with the past that has come to define this period of Greek literature is not a simple matter of nostalgia but rather of critical memory, one that allowed the authors of this period to reimagine and keep alive a deliberative civic space. Jarratt’s aim in this book is not at its core an entirely new idea. That said, what makes her work so thought provoking is her desire to locate “a colonial counterdiscourse” in a broad range of works (38). Moreover, she is certainly correct that too often classicists have been overly hesitant about reading the literature of the period through the lens of postcolonial theory (3). In addition to an introductory chapter outlining the monograph’s methodology, Chain of Gold develops this argument across six case studies, covering respectively Dio Chyrsostom’s Euboean Discourse (Chapter 2), Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (Chapter 3), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana [End Page 103] (Chapter 4) and Imagines (Chapter 5), Heliodorus’ Aithiopika (Chapter 6), and Libanius’ To Those Who Call Him Tiresome (Chapter 7). Generally speaking, this is a nice mixture of well-trod and often overlooked texts. Her strongest chapters are those which connect what she calls rhetorical vision to the post-colonial concerns outlined in the monograph’s first chapter. For example, her discussion in Chapter 3 of Aristides’ Roman Oration explores how “the ‘ sophist . . . draws on the resources of [Homeric] epic to enhance his powers of visualization,” providing his audience not only “a phantasm of [Rome’s] imperium but also a techne of viewing” (47). Likewise, Chapter 5 reads Philostratus’ Imagines—an intriguing collection of descriptions of works of art—as an exploration in rhetorical vision that pushes the limits of ekphrasis. Treating the text as a museum of sorts, Jarratt acts as curator, bringing out how the text handles reoccurring images of youth, women, and different ethnicities, among others. This is Jarratt’s most successful chapter, in part thanks to the inclusion of an appendix, which maps out the paintings in relation to one another. In a few instances, however, Jarratt does not make full use of the ancient evidence. The clearest example of this comes in her discussion of Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Discourse (Or. 7). In this speech, Dio professes that he will narrate a personal experience, relating how, after being shipwrecked in Euboea, he was taken in by a huntsman, who recounted his own troubled participation in local politics. The huntsman’s tale then prompts Dio to expound on...
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Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil ↗
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Reviewed by: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil Sara Hillin Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 In a thoroughly researched and timely study of women’s participation in American political life, Tammy R. Vigil explores how partners of presidential nominees have navigated the thorny territory of public and private spaces, often battling the media’s representation of their roles as wives, mothers, and public political figures in their own right. The text concerns itself in part with how presidential nominees’ partners offer insights into “the expectations of presidential partners” despite the fact that, as Vigil acknowledges, there are no established guidelines for evaluating the work of [End Page 100] the (almost always) women who fulfill that role (2). Though the book gives special emphasis to the years between 1992 (hailed as the Year of the Woman) and 2016, Vigil begins with a rich historical discussion of presidential wives’ involvement in their husbands’ campaigns, mentioning, for example, how Louisa Adams “used open house receptions to court potential supporters for her husband’s bid for the presidency” (5). Such examples, which involve women facilitating a salon type of discourse, echo suggestions from rhetoricians such as Christine de Pizan, who championed women’s ability to use influence as a rhetorical tool. Vigil’s ethos in this historical and rhetorical analysis is firmly established in the introductory chapter, where she takes readers as far back as 1808, noting that evidence of smear campaigns against presidential candidates’ wives may have begun with women such as Dolley Madison, who was in 1808 “accused of having had an affair with incumbent president Thomas Jefferson” (3). Vigil’s sharp attention to the fact that some sort of media presence has, almost from the beginning, either helped or hampered presidential nominees’ spouses, provides a corrective to any notion that such interference is a more recent phenomenon. Vigil spends much of the introductory and first chapters exploring the evolution of women’s involvement in political life, noting how, although women “were initially conceived of as apolitical beings” (34), they were actively involved in all facets of decision making in certain “public roles customarily closed to them” during men’s absence through the American Revolution (22). Noting the restrictive view of women’s ability to “function outside the home” (17) promulgated by influential writers such as David Hume, Vigil illustrates how women were indeed more than capable of rising to the challenge of political participation as more opportunities became available to them. Vigil also notes how nineteenth-century ideologies about women began to shift and how changing beliefs regarding the necessity of women’s public participation—as evidenced by texts such as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On the Subjection of Women (23)—allowed women to go to work outside the home and, therefore, move more fluidly between the public and private sphere (24). The first chapter also introduces a concept that anchors much of the discussion of political wives/mothers in the rest of the text: republican motherhood, which Vigil notes was a “rhetorical strategy” (28) to push the notion of an “ideal female patriot” (27). The republican mother, Vigil notes, was a concept that left women “duty-bound to protect and cultivate the home” but also encouraged debates concerning “women’s appropriate concerns and actions outside the home” (28). The essential historical groundwork laid in the introductory and first chapters allows readers to much more fully appreciate both the political opportunities that have opened up for women since and the challenges that those opportunities have presented. The subsequent chapters of Moms in Chief explore more specifically how various presidential nominees’ partners have been seen to either adhere to or deviate from the republican motherhood framework. The second chapter concerns itself with Barbara Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two seemingly [End Page 101] diametrically opposed figures when discussed from the terministic screen of republican motherhood. If the ideal republican mother was, as Vigil notes, “other-centric, self-sacrificing, primarily concerned with domesticity, and...
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Reviewed by: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics by Michele Kennerly David L. Marshall Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 There exists a set of topoi still alive—undead—within ancient, medieval, and early modem historiographies of rhetoric that circles “the loss of politics” as the crucial fact when it comes to narrating the coming into being and passing away of rhetoric. Politics itself as an object of such attachment may take several forms, but it is the beginning and sine qua non of rhetorical [End Page 91] application. In her disciplined yet frequently humorous Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly boils the politics-as-lost-object topoi down to the bone: “oratory flourishes in democracies only, the Hellenistic age [for example] was undemocratic, ergo there were no speeches worth preserving” (56). Kennerly tilts at the politics-as-lost-object topoi (and contests this characterization of the Hellenic) from a refreshing and subtle angle—that of editing, revision, what she terms “ corpus-care” (15). For her, turning to the curation of texts with rhetorical attention is not the reluctant decision of a culture that has lost its opportunities to speak and decide together in public. As Kennerly puts it, “rather than being indicators of political decline or decadence, polished and published prose and verse point to contestation over what sort of words best sustain communal life,” and, in this way, “writing is no less democratic or republican than speaking: the two verbal forms live parallel lives” (209). Hers is also a re-reading of the early histories of both Greek and Roman rhetoric showing how concern for the written record was always at issue alongside concern for the oral performance. Kennerly’s approach yields instructive angles on a series of authors. We encounter what she calls “Horace’s meticulous file,” his editorial metaphor of choice for smoothing stylistic burrs. But Kennerly pushes against “a prevailing view on Horace’s strictures on the stilus-, that he ‘made a virtue out of a political necessity’”—“the ‘necessity’ being the need to watch one’s words as the imperial period gained force” (109). In her reading, Ovid is someone who “displays his editorial body” cultivating thereby “the image of a man trying to correct his mistakes” (134), and this leads to “the (cultivated) shabbiness of his corpora,” which for Kennerly “accords with their tristis situation” (139). Political exile means disheveled self-consuming textual performance. In reference to Quintilian, editing implies compilation and overview stemming from care, and “the enmbased lexical family is the progenitor of ‘curative’ and ‘curation,’ both of which apply to Quintilian’s labors: he sees what ails various oratorical corpora and means to cure them through his curation of rhetoric’s traditions and orations” (164). Editing, reworking, compiling, creating a summative edition—all these should be understood in terms of established rhetorical topoi. Just so, in Quintilian, compiling is also a form of ethopoetic exercise, and such processes become “habituation hexis (Greek, lit. ‘having’)” rendered sometimes, as we know, “in Latin as facilitas (ease)” (162). Always, Kennerly is attentive to the embodiments of writing and editing. In Latin, she relays, the “edowords”—at the root of “edit” and its variants—were themselves richly enmeshed in a slew of metaphors “from giving birth, to uttering words, to presenting something for inspection, to displaying it publicly, to publishing it” and did not denote “prepublic textual activities” (2). And the terms ancient Romans did use for textual revision drew on a range of artisan prototypes: “they dragged away, cut out, pressed, smoothed, polished, hammered, filed, and shaved” (2). On the Greek side, “gluing” was an important metaphor domain because it had pertinent literal applications too: “writers would glue papyrus patches atop errors to hide them or to insert emendations on top of them” (29). Again, [End Page 92] Kennerly is quick to note that “turning the stilus” was “idiomatic for rubbing out with the flat end of the stilus something written into a wax tablet with the pointed end” (79). It should thus come as no surprise that, although this work is ancient in...
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Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics by Olga V. Solovieva ↗
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Reviewed by: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics by Olga V. Solovieva Mark Clavier Olga V. Solovieva, Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780810136007 Few images have carried as much rhetorical power as corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. Originating in Jesus’ performative presentation of his own Body at the Last Supper and interpreted through the lens of the crucifixion, it quickly became one of the primary theological metaphors for the church. For example, Paul draws on the imagery of Christ’s Body in 1 Corinthians to demonstrate the mutual dependence and deep communion that should characterize the Corinthian church. Paul’s own use points to an integrative understanding of the image that not only promotes Christian unity but also establishes that unity as integral to Christian identity. In this way, the Body of Christ has been used to persuade would-be schismatics and heretics to “submit themselves one to another.” In short, Christ’s Body is more than simply an object of veneration—it contains rhetorical potency. In Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, Olga Solovieva demonstrates how this rhetorical power has also been regularly and paradoxically deployed subversively, even iconoclastically. She does this by rooting her study of the rhetorical power of Christ’s Body in Paul’s highly rhetorical argument in 1 Corinthians 1.18-31 that Christ’s crucified Body profoundly challenges the powers of the world. Drawing on Dale Martin, Alam Badiou, and J. L. Austin, she proposes that Christ’s Body serves here a performative function—what she terms “an ideological operator” (10)—that both inaugurates and persuades: “It means not the destruction but the substitution of one system of meaning by another within a shared cultural horizon” (11). But because these rhetorical practices invariably result in the weakening of power, she interprets them as subversive rather than substitutionary. In Chapters 1–6, Solovieva carefully studies and explains how Christ’s Body is employed in this way in six completely disconnected historical situations: the iconoclasm of Epiphanius of Salamis, the 15th-century alchemical Book of the Holy Trinity, in the aesthetics of Johann Caspar Lavater, Dostoevsky’s Genealogy of Ethical Consciousness, the cinematography of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and by the Right in contemporary American politics. The span of genres covered here speaks not only to the breadth of Solovieva’s [End Page 88] expertise but also her particular perspective as a scholar of comparative literature. While some who may be interested in the underlying theology or ideological power of corpus Christi may find the basis for her broad comparative approach problematic, it would be hard to deny her ability to draw key insights from each of her case studies. Collectively, they also highlight how Christ’s Body has transcended confessional boundaries to shape the rhetoric and practices of people and groups even on the margins of Christian orthodoxy. For example, in her chapter on Epiphanius, Solovieva persuasively argues that one of the foundations for Epiphanius’s iconoclasm was his concern about the rhetorical impact of venerating the image of Christ on the Christian’s self-awareness of being part of the Body of Christ—in effect, seeing Christ’s Body compromised the worshiper’s sense of being Christ’s Body. Articulating this in the context of contemporary arguments (as in Eusebius) of church buildings functioning symbolically as Christ’s Body in zvhich Christians worship is enormously helpful. It allows the iconoclastic argument to move beyond mere aversion to idolatry (though that remains) and stand out more starkly as a challenge to Roman imperial power, the rhetoric of which was based in part on the worship of imperial images. Similar striking analyses abound in this volume. Solvovieva’s overall argument, however, is weakened by the disparity of her examples. While she does fine work in each chapter of demonstrating the cultural subversiveness of Christ’s Body, her lack of a conclusion that draws her argument together is striking in light of the expanse of time and genres she covers. Although each chapter is masterly in its grasp of...
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Abstract
Reviewed by: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin Denise Stodola Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 It is unusual but incredibly useful when authors challenge their readers to think about familiar terms in unfamiliar ways, which is what Steele Nowlin has done here. Calling upon his readers to view the terms “affect” and “invention” through a different lens, he shows us that these two concepts are intimately linked even though “affect” is often used as a synonym for emotion. For Nowlin, affect and emotion are separate concepts that interact with each other. In fact, in his configuration, affect [End Page 98] is a type of “emergence” that precedes an actual feeling or emotion. Because affect concerns an “emerging” potential, it is thus linked to invention, which is, itself, an emerging potential. More specifically, affect emerges and then “collapses” into emotion, and this is analogous to the way in which invention “collapses” into poetic form. By reshaping our perceptions of how affect precedes emotion and is therefore analogous to invention preceding form, we are then able to view poetic invention differently. Ultimately, invention not only shapes poetic form, but can, in many cases, expose cultural narratives that are themselves in need of revision. Moreover, Nowlin does a fine job of contextualizing his theoretical approach within the introductory chapter. He asserts that his work relies heavily on Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, as well as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick. He also uses the work of scholars like Eric Shouse, Brian Massumi, Gregory J. Seigworth, Melissa Gregg, Lauren Berlant, Mary Carruthers, and Rita Copeland. By showing the relationship of his work to that of other scholars—not only those focused on critical theory, but also those who specialize in “feeling theory,” as well as medieval scholars and rhetoricians— Nowlin provides a solid foundation for his theoretical approach. On the other hand, the order of the subsequent chapters is somewhat strained. In the first two chapters, he focuses on Chaucer, first on House of Fame in Chapter 1, and then on Legend of Good Women in Chapter 2. The placement of these chapters makes sense insofar as they both focus on Chaucer and illustrate not only how Chaucer’s works can been seen to deploy Nowlin’s formulation but also how neither of the works pushes past a potential realization of cultural narratives into any sort of action. In House of Fame, physical movement aligns affect with invention, bringing together the literary with the political and ultimately illustrating how the affective dynamic helps us to understand “patterns of cultural power.” In this case, that power is the power of literary men to find their own fame by using women. Dido, in fact, becomes a symbol for what Nowlin calls the “coemergence” of affect and invention, and the form resulting from invention does not provide any answer to Dido’s plight. Legend of Good Women, however, addresses misogyny and antifeminism more fully. Ultimately, though, it does not move past its own misogyny, but rather leaves the reader understanding how unethical that misogyny is. As such, it reveals the cultural narratives in which the work itself exists. By putting these two chapters next to each other, we are able to see both poems rely on affective invention and how the Legend of Good Women moves closer to an invention that more clearly articulates the misogyny of the culture in which it was produced. Chapters 3 and 4 could be brought together into one chapter as both focus on Gower’s Gonfessio Amantis, and both illustrate Gower’s success with the use of affective invention to effect potential change. Chapter 3 shows that the affective invention in the Confessio reveals masculinist cultural discourses and how they shape cultural reality, suggesting a potential need to transform the culture in which it was produced. Similarly, Chapter 4 argues that the chronicle form as a means of codifying significant cultural events and providing an authoritative version of those events has fundamentally opposite [End Page 99] impulses from what Gower’s poem ultimately achieves: invention of not only a...
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The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline Martin T. Dinter T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Cultural memory is a strange beast indeed. While there is no doubt that Cicero sculpted his own image during his lifetime, he could hardly have foreseen that as soon as the first century AD he would be defined by his style—i.e., that the style would become the man. The incorporation of Cicero into Roman cultural memory is thus highly selective. Without explicitly buying into the framework of cultural memory studies, Keeline, in the revised version of his 2014 Harvard dissertation, illuminates this process in seven chapters by focusing on Cicero’s early reception. The first four chapters on the reception of Cicero in Roman education are followed by three more specialized sections on Cicero in the works of Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Reception indeed serves as the overarching framework for this monograph, even though Keeline shies away from deconstructing its tenets. We cannot fathom whether or not Roman schoolboys “enjoyed” reading Cicero as much as today’s students, but Keeline employs Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the commentaries of Asconius, and the Scholia Bobiensia to illustrate how young Romans would have encountered Cicero’s speech Pro Milone in the classroom. The rhetorically focused pedagogical approach—namely, the narrowing of Cicero’s persona and personality in a pedagogical context to a model of eloquence (which strips him of his historical and psychological complexity)—that emerges from this analysis usefully exemplifies the process Keeline expounds in the second chapter. The third chapter highlights the prominence of Cicero’s death in Roman declamation. It proposes that the narrative that Cicero was murdered by Popilius, a former client whom he had previously defended against the charge of parricide, is but an added color of the rhetorician schools. This nevertheless fits neatly with Octavian’s desire to downplay his own role in the proscriptions and shift the blame onto Mark Anthony. Cicero thus does not serve as advocate of Republican freedom but rather as advocate of freedom from Mark Anthony. In addition, the style and content of these declamations left behind traces in the accounts of Cicero’s death by Valerius Maximus and many of the historiographers such as Florus, Velleius Paterculus, and later authors such as Cassius Dio and Appian. In contrast, the chronologically fairly early accounts by Livy and Asinius Pollio still offer a morally more complicated image of both Cicero and the events surrounding his death. In the fourth chapter, Keeline ingeniously examines a group of pseudepigraphic texts that have distilled Cicero to the essence consumed in declamation schools: the Invective against Cicero (Ps.-Sallust) contrasts neatly with the Invective against Sallust (Ps.-Cicero), the Speech delivered the day before Cicero went into exile and the Letter to Octavian (Ps.-Cicero), and a pair of Ps.-Brutus’ letters to Cicero and Atticus (transmitted as Cic. Ad Brut. 1.16 and 1.17). Stylistically faithful, these texts concentrate on major life events such as Cicero’s consulship, his exile, and his speeches against Mark Anthony. [End Page 90] In addition, they provide an inventory of the tropes that formed around Cicero s life and character and subsequently found their way into the historiographical tradition. The book’s second part delves into the oeuvres, of Seneca the Younger (chapter 5), Tacitus (chapter 6), and Pliny the Younger (chapter 7) and analyses how each of them comes to terms with the über-father Cicero. Seneca the Younger adopts neither Cicero’s style nor his philosophy or educational theories. Even in his edifying letters to Lucilius, he only utilises Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus as a foil against which he constructs his own philosophical achievements. While Seneca the Elder engages frequently and substantially with Cicero, in his son’s works Cicero is conspicuous by absence. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus is steeped in Cicero as Keeline demonstrates by analysing the speeches by Aper...
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Abstract
This tenth-anniversary volume is an occasion to read A Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing reflexively, by turning its focus on critical thinking and writing back on itself as an academic genre that organizes knowledge according to time.A journal assumes time to be a linear, unidirectional movement segmented into a past, which has already happened; a present, which is happening; and a future, which has yet to happen.This sequence is inscribed in a journal's paratextuality, such as a chronological division into annual volumes, which conforms reading to knowledge configured temporally: a reference to a text locates that text in the past; an argument against locates a text in the present; and questions for further research locate a text in the future.This commonplace notion of time informs a process of inquiry understandable across the disciplines, but it is also at odds with disciplinary theories of temporality.Consider, for a moment, how the visual arts can realign perception with uncommon patterns of time.When this volume's cover image is viewed according to its title, Counter-Curve (see Figure 1), it creates a curvilinear motion that either quickens along contracting concentric circles or slows along expanding concentric circles.Each motion, as a counter-curve, implies the other, inverse motion, but the either/or structure of perception limits our awareness of time's bidirectionality, described by the image's artist, Dana Karwas (n.d.), as "a single moment curving infinitely around on itself" (para.10).As a moment, time is undivided into past, present, and future.It is instead composed of recurrences that simultaneously spiral inwardly toward an infinitesimal center of nonrecurrence, a point of origin, and outwardly toward an infinite circumference that is the end of time.Because our perception can align with time's contraction or expansion, but not both at once, Counter-Curve can perhaps explain an otherwise paradoxical experience of the moment as ephemeral and durable.If the last ten years of Double Helix is telescoped to this swirl of time, then the practice of reading the journal changes.It locates one in the moment, a condition of "mindfulness" that Ellen Carillo (2016) has advocated for reading, in which one sustains attention to the text, undistracted by the past or the future, because, in this case, neither the past nor the future exists.A sequence of texts is thereby converted into an intertext, and a reference to, an argument against, and questions for further research become recurring features of intertextuality that advance an area of knowledge toward pure originality and the completion of knowledge as ideal and inverse limits of inquiry (see Figure 2).