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1433 articlesMay 2018
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Review: Disability Rhetoric, by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, by Shannon Walters ↗
Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2018 Review: Disability Rhetoric, by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, by Shannon Walters Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN: 9781611173833 Timothy Barr Timothy Barr Timothy Barr 5179 Kincaid St. Pittsburgh, Pa 15524 USA timothybarr@pitt.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2018) 36 (2): 205–208. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205 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 Timothy Barr; Review: Disability Rhetoric, by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, by Shannon Walters. Rhetorica 1 May 2018; 36 (2): 205–208. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205 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. © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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“To Whom Do We Have Students Write?”: Exploring Rhetorical Agency and Translanguaging in an Indonesian Graduate Writing Classroom ↗
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In keeping with the recent global turn in literacy and composition studies, this article explores rhetorical agency in an English-medium Indonesian PhD program. Drawing from the critical reflective lens teacher ethnography allows, the author highlights how graduate students at this Indonesian, yet international site negotiated both textually and extra-textually with the critical pedagogy she developed, while she also questions some of her initial assumptions concerning genre, audience, and rhetorical agency. Overall, the data presented here indicates that rather than focusing solely on textual form as a site of critical agency, teachers and scholars should also take into consideration the ways writers appropriate and circulate knowledge to the diverse audiences in their lives, across multiple genres and languages—and as time unfolds. Broadening the lens to account for such translingual agency might also benefit U.S.-based graduate writing pedagogies, the author ultimately suggests.
April 2018
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Kenneth Burke confessed that Permanence and Change was a secularization of the writing of Mary Baker Eddy that he learned in his Christian Science childhood. Eddy’s Platonic treatment of substance as “truth” engages with the tension between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, foreshadowing Burke’s treatment of substance in relation to symbol, nonsymbol, and identification. The ways in which substance and identification interact in the works of Plato, Eddy, and Burke follow a line of discursive development that can illuminate critical review of how different forms of public discourse argue for “truth.”
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The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus’ Histories with Special Attention to Books 5–9 by Vasiliki Zali ↗
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432 RHETORIC A The final topic, that of chapter eight, is lexis, "style." Enos says very lit tle about traditional features of style (e.g., pleonasm, prose rhythm), but dis cusses instead Demosthenes's "stylistic strategy," which consists primarily of what he calls "chiastic contrasting" (191). More than to chiasmus, this seems connected to antithesis, that is, the "polar" or "diametrical" opposi tion between Aeschines and himself. Enos concludes that like Lincoln, Churchill, and King, Demosthenes raised political oratory to a literary art and created a speech perfectly fitted for the political and rhetorical moment. The book could have used some good copy-editing and proof-reading; in particular, the bibliography is not easy to use. It consists of four sections; texts and translation of Demosthenes, translations and studies of Aeschines, studies of Demosthenes, and general studies. The first section is especially difficult: almost all works are under Demosthenes as author, followed by the title, so that if one is looking for X's translation, one needs to remember its exact title (some of the Texas series have the title Demosthe nes: Speeches . . ., whereas others are just Speeches . . .). Dilts's OCT is listed as a translation, as are several commentaries (e.g., Wankel's). One author is "Harris Edward Monroe." Etc. In sum, this book has much of value, especially Walker's chapter. But starting from scratch rather than revising a fifty year old publication might have improved its value. Michael Gagarin The University of Texas Vasiliki Zali. The Shape ofHerodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus' Histories with Special Attention to Books 5-9. Interna tional Studies in the History of Rhetoric 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. VIII + 383 pp. ISBN: 9789004278967 This is a well-researched, detailed, and well-presented literary analy sis of the Histories of Herodotus that substantiates the author's claim that the Histories is an under-appreciated contributor to the development of rhetoric in the 5th century. As Zali explains, the intent of the work is "to show that in the Histories there is great interest in the rhetorical situation per se; that speakers are very well aware of the process of manipulating and adapting their arguments to suit the particular audience, and they do so systematically" (3). In this way, Herodotus can be understood as anticipat ing the rhetorical developments of Thucydides and the more theoretically oriented works of both Aristotle and the author of the Rhetoric to Alexan der. The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric is characterized by the use of specific textual examples to illustrate claims about how the text operates. It also provides an impressive mixture of contextual information that is historical, political, and cultural in scope. These elements are trained on the larger Reviews 433 purpose of "a comprehensive study of particular modes, kinds and effects of speech, exemplified through in-depth discussions of case studies and of the ways these related to two overarching narrative themes: the GrecoPersian polarity and the problem of Greek unity" (31). The focus on these two themes, through the analysis of Herodotus' rhetorical choices, is divided into three sections. In the first section, "Allo cation of Speech," the analysis extends to the impact of the speeches both included and excluded as well as the selective use of both direct and indi rect speech. Zali takes these selections and choices by Herodotus to be rhe torical, choices that are made in order to advance his interpretive and persuasive goals. They are also shown to be empowering for the Greeks as presented in the text and disempowering for the Persians. Zali thus makes a strong case that these choices by Herodotus were not random. As a result, while Cicero and many others have viewed him as the father of history, Herodotus should also be viewed as a significant figure in the development of rhetoric. The text includes an appendix that categorizes all of the debates and conversations in books 5-9 by speaker, addressee and mode of speech (i.e., direct, indirect, and record of a speech act). In the second section of the book, Zali shows that a narrow definition of debate, as consisting only of instances reported as direct speech, yields...
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Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies ed. by Cinthia Gannett, John C. Brereton ↗
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Reviews 437 dianoia (thought) in the Poetics where Aristotle assigns it to his Rhetoric, even though, Bialostosky observes, it occupies, at best, an inferred presence in that work (138). Performing a close and careful rereading of both texts, Bialos tosky concludes that Aristotle's assigning of dianoia to the Rhetoric is evidence of what Bakhtin calls a "hidden polemic" Aristotle conducts with a sophisticinspired "poetics of the utterance" that pre-dated both of these works. This line of argument ultimately leads Bialostosky to something of an unexpected reversal. Where he had earlier argued for a separate discipline, or "art of dialogics," he now perceives that art as but one of many that can be "responsive to the predisciplinary scene of action" (146). Drawing upon the architectonics of Bakhtin's early works, Bialostosky now thinks it possi ble to "refer our sometimes calcified institutionalized disciplines at least to an imagined, reconstructed common world that preceded them and still underwrites them" (147). Such a world is inaccessible, Bialostosky argues, except through the sorts of "radical inquiries" that "Bakhtin and Heidegger undertook in the 1920s" (147). Such a world is inaccessible so long as we think of disciplines as fixed, able to stay within the boundaries drawn for them. For not only does disciplinarity exceed itself in interdisciplinarity, it also discovers a surplus in its predisciplinary origins. And it is here that Bia lostosky sees a particular significance for Bakhtin, whose "dialogic field of discourse [is] broader than the modem disciplines or the ancient ones of rhetoric and dialectic" (82). Heard again as a complete utterance, what questions does Bialostosky's work pose for contemporary inquiry? Does Bakhtin and Voloshinov's inter est in intonation, for example, bear any relevance to our interest in sonic rhetorics? Does Bakhtin's regard for the historical significance of the "per son-idea" connect to recent investigations into the meanings of embodi ment? Is the shift from epistemology to ontology, as posited by the new materialism, reflected in Bialostosky's conception of Bakhtin's architecton ics as predisciplinary? These questions cannot be answered here. But if Bakhtin still speaks to us, as I believe he does, then Bialostosky's essays will serve as exemplary models of how to engage Bakhtin with care, insight, and admirable rigor, and collectively, as an invitation for future dialogues. Frank Farmer University of Kansas Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton, eds., Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies, New York: Fordham Uni versity Press, 2016. 444 pp. ISBN: 9780823264537 This book contributes in welcome and valuable ways to the history of rhetoric, the history of education, and current rhetorical pedagogy. It is an 438 RHETORICA enriching read, with provocative and significant theoretical implications. These essays raise important questions concerning central disciplinary issues and make available to both theorists and teachers richly encompass ing and hence highly generative curricular models with wide applicability. I thoroughly enjoyed the time spent perusing these pages and have already begun to draw upon the resources herein to bolster both my own scholar ship and teaching. This Jesuit tradition brings into view a rhetorical para digm that is truly "transdisciplinary" (xv). As the editors acknowledge, the book provides the "first maps of this huge intellectual geography" (xv). Therefore, I look forward to future scholarship on Jesuit contributions to rhetorical theory and pedagogy. Following the three distinct periods of Jesuit education from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century to the present day, the book is divided into three sections: 1) studies of Jesuit rhetorical instruction from 1540, when Ignatius Loyola and friends founded the Society of Jesus, to 1773, when Jesuit education was suppressed by the pope; 2) studies of Jesuit rhetorical education from 1789, when many Jesuits moved to North Ame rica and established colleges and universities, to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which marked the end of the rhetoric-centered curricu lum in Jesuit institutions; and 3) studies of developments in rhetorical ins truction in United States' Jesuit higher education from the 1960s to the present. Although some description of the grammar school classroom appears in several early chapters, the primary emphasis of the book is on higher education. Each section contains a loosely...
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434 RHETORICA The conclusion of this work is quite substantive. Zali takes up the question of Herodotus' authority as an author as it has been positioned and debated by scholars. He brings in the question of the extent to which Bakhtin's theory of dialogism can inform our understanding of Herotodus and the openness or closedness of the work for the reader. Zali presents and supports the view that Herodotus constructed an open text for readers through the strategic inclusion of Greek and Persian voices in multiple forms. That is, the Histories persistently calls the reader into conversation with historical figures and events. In addition, Zali places his study of the Histories in the context of the recent scholarly trend of interpreting the text metahistorically. Zali sees his treatment of Herodotus as consistent with this interpretive trend and even pushing that trend further in terms of its eluci dation of Herodotus' "stance towards current oratorical practices, for his method of writing history, and for how readers are supposed to approach his work" (312). While this is already a lengthy study, the effort would have been stronger had the author better and more fully situated the main study within contemporary and historical studies of Herodotus. More specifi cally, given that the author's main claim concerns the significance of Herodotus' Histories in the development of rhetoric in the 5th Century, this work needed to situate the reader within the extensive scholarship of this development which has been generated over the last several decades in the fields of Rhetoric, English, Philosophy, and Communication Studies. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this meticulous and well-presented study of Hero dotus and the argument made concerning its role in the development of rhetoric, and I highly recommend it to others. David M. Timmerman Carthage College Bialostosky, Don. Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rheto rically. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, LLC, 2016. 191 pp. ISBN 9781602357259 In the centerpiece essay to the collection entitled Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin takes upon himself the task of distinguishing between linguistics and metalinguistics. To illuminate this distinction, he argues that linguistics is best exemplified by the sentence, and that metalin guistics is best exemplified by the utterance. Bakhtin then proceeds to cata logue the differences between these two units of analysis, and it is clear that his interests lie with the latter. In charting out these differences, Bakhtin makes a claim that is particularly germane to the work reviewed here— namely, that while the sentence is endlessly repeatable (because as decontextualized linguistic matter," it neither answers nor addresses anyone), Reviews 435 the utterance, being thoroughly situated in dialogic contexts, can never be repeated. It is in this sense that Don Bialostosky's Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poet ics, Dialogics, Rhetoricalitp ought to be regarded—that is, as a gathering of utterances, published at various junctures over the course of a distinguished career by one of the pre-eminent Bakhtin scholars in literary and rhetorical studies. As utterances, these essays are addressed to varied and specific audiences, in diverse scholarly contexts, in response to what others have said and in anticipation of what still others may yet say. If Bakhtin is right, even though all of these utterances (save one) have been previously publis hed, each may be considered simultaneously old and new. It is not possible, then, to read or hear these essays in the same way they were received at the time of their original publication, but it is possible to hear them as newly uttered, as saying something different in the context in which they are now reread, or heard again. I want to complicate things a bit more. Instead of looking upon this collection as a gathering of juxtaposed utterances, what if it were to be regarded an utterance in its own right? In fact, the author anticipates this possibility, and indeed, desires that his collection be read this way. At the close of his introduction, Bialostosky says of his earlier essays that they "stand here as a whole utterance re-articulated by my arrangement and re-affirmation of them." It is up to readers, those co-constitutive "outsi ders," to bring to them what they will (15). As...
March 2018
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This book examines the multimodal rhetoric of scientific arguments as they have been expressed in professional journals over the course of the past century. Through a series of chronologically ordered case studies, the author applies and develops a syncretic model for understanding scientific argumentation, which he articulates in Part 1 of the book and which relies heavily on major concepts in rhetorical theory. By applying the model to the case studies, the author demonstrates how rhetoric can provide the analytical machinery needed to grapple with the multimodal means used to create scientific arguments. In Part 2, the focus is a groundbreaking 1912 publication in the field now known as X-ray diffraction crystallography, specifically a set of X-ray photogram images included in the article that would help scientists at the time gain a better understanding of both the nature of X-rays and the atomic structure of crystals. Parts 3 and 4 present the book’s more interesting (from a multimodal perspective) case studies in terms of how arguments are assembled, circulated, and reassembled over time. In Part 5, Chapter 12 examines the rise of Photoshop as a material affordance for scientific arguments and the ethical dilemmas that this rise has precipitated. Chapter 13 provides description and tabular analysis of the use of videos in published scientific arguments, from an era when VHS tapes were mailed with journal issues through the YouTube era. It is in these chapters where the salience of and potential for the author’s model becomes clearer: As the use of multimodality rises in scientific arguments through the use of new technologies, new and better means for understanding how arguments are conceived, assembled, and circulated are needed both for authors and for teachers. Both audiences would benefit from reading Assembling Arguments. The book does not have a specific engineering focus, but it does provide a broad framework for professional communicators, teachers, and students to consider and improve visuals and multimodality in document design.
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Rhetorical Differences in Research Article Discussion Sections of High- and Low-Impact Articles in the Field of Chemical Engineering ↗
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This study aims to delineate the rhetorical organization of research article (RA) discussion sections in an engineering discipline and explore the variations that distinguish discussion sections of high-impact and low-impact RAs. Research questions: What is the rhetorical organization of RA discussions in chemical engineering? What are the similarities and differences in the use of rhetorical moves and steps in RA discussions of high-impact and low-impact articles? Literature review: Some studies have been conducted using Swales' move analysis with regard to the identification and textual comparisons of RA discussion sections. However, it remains to be determined whether RA discussions of the high- and low-impact articles within a single discipline display the variation in rhetorical patterns. Research methodology: A total of 40 RA discussions published between 2005 and 2015 were chosen based on five-year journal impact factor and citations of the articles in which they were published. Swales' move analysis was used to compare rhetorical moves and steps in both sets of RA discussions. Results and discussion: The study identified the rhetorical organization of RA discussions in the field of chemical engineering. The findings indicate that discussion sections of high-impact articles tend to make use of the “comment on results” move. Explanations of the similarities and differences in the employment of moves and steps are provided. Implications of the findings are discussed.
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Disability Rhetoric by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and: Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters ↗
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Reviews Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454 Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN9781611173833 Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's defi nition of rhetoric. In early translations it appears as a faculty, following the European vernaculars and the Latin translation of Aristotle's dunamis with facultas. Yet even if this translation flattens the complex significance of Aristotle's original sense, it happily brings us within the orbit of pressing problems in our own moment. We may now pose new questions: If rhetoric insists it be thought of as an ability, how might we inflect this idée reçue of the field by thinking through the meaning of rhetoric from a position of disability? This is not a matter of simple inversion. Disability is not the opposite of ability but the suspension of the assumptions of ableism. In this sense, it is like disbelief. We say we are in a 'state of disbelief' precisely when we are presented with incontrovertible evidence that commands assent. Disability rhetoric, then, seeks to illuminate the unreflective assump tions and heuristics that we commonly use to make judgments concerning the conditions and abilities of others. In Disability Rhetoric and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, Jay Timothy Dolmage and Shannon Walters offer book-length elaborations of what such a rhetoric might be. The authors do not simply challenge rhetoric about disability or examine disability advocacy rhetorically, although both these aims are crucial to their projects. The authors argue that a thoroughgoing criticism of ableism requires a reexamination of rhetorical history and theory. The classical tradition's inability to think through bodily difference made it narrower than it otherwise might have been. Quintilian asserted that the limits of rhetorical education could be found in the body of the orator, "for assuredly no one can exhibit proper delivery if he lacks a memory for retaining what he has written or ready facility in uttering what he has to speak extempore, or if he has any incurable defect of utterance." Any such "extraordinary deformity of body ... cannot be remedied by any effort of art" (11.3.10). Unable to think of bodily difference as anything but deformity gave ancient rhetorical theory a Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 2, pp. 205-215. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205. 206 RHETORIC A false sense of order and precision, erected upon the assumption that audience and orator could be treated as positions within a discourse rather than approa ched within the complexity of situated and contested embodiment. These books can be taken as complementary projects. Dolmage wishes to extend and reinterpret the repertoire and vocabulary of critical rhetoric. Walters focuses on the inventional strategies of disabled persons and their circles. This is not to say that Dolmage neglects invention or Walters criti cism. Disability rhetoric shows the imbrication of criticism and invention, since both rely upon practices of sensitization. We might extract six maxims to serve as guideposts for furthering this critical-inventive program. 1. Modes of communication require invention and shape meaning. The con stitution of communication between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in the now famous story of their experience at the water pump (Sullivan hand spelling 'water' in Keller's palm after running water over her hand, marked by Keller as her entry into language) resulted from a pragmatic awareness of possible channels of meaning-making. Walters argues that many of these possibilities reside within touch and her book serves in part as a collection of examples showing the variety and power of haptic communication. Perhaps even more importantly, a disability rhetoric would attend to the way in which the mode of communication constitutes and affects the meaning of the communication. Rather than appealing to the sensus communis...
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“Caliphate” against the Crown: Martyrdom, Heresy, and the Rhetoric of Enemyship in the Kingdom of Jordan ↗
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Abstract The execution of captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in February 2015 by Daesh (or ISIS) forces generated large public outcry in Jordan and thereby presented the regime of King Abdullah II with a moment of danger. In response to this rhetorical situation, the Abdullah regime engaged in rhetorics of enemyship based on appeals to religious orthodoxy, authoritarian ideology, and apocalyptic language. By examining these texts, this essay seeks to draw from contemporary rhetorical scholarship on terrorism, enemyship, and mass violence to expand the heuristic scope of the rhetoric of enemyship to include political rhetoric situated outside democratic contexts.
February 2018
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ABSTRACTThe enthymeme is well known in rhetorical theory as a three-part syllogism from which one premise has been elided. The enthymeme works because the listener supplies the “missing piece,” thereby participating in the very argument by which she is persuaded. This enthymeme is widely believed to derive from Aristotle, but previous scholars have shown that the “truncated syllogism” view of the enthymeme is both un-Aristotelian and impracticable. In this article, I review problems with the syllogistic enthymeme and reasons for its improbable longevity before proposing a view of the enthymeme that derives not from the syllogism but from the legal narratives produced by early Greek orators. The enthymeme is best understood not through its deductive structure, but its emplotment. This model makes sense of Aristotle's comments without relying on a discredited syllogistic frame to explain how ancient orators argued.
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Abstract
As we so often trip about and lose our breath over speaking precisely to “what is rhetoric(al)?,” it should come to no surprise that being asked what we want of rhetoric, of language, of an other (in language) moves us to fidget, even brings us to blush. But if we pause with these questions, lips parted without yet the words to answer, we may notice a peculiar craving that churns before the naming. We want of rhetoric—but what? We are compelled toward rhetoric—whereto? We seek in rhetoric—for? If this desire, what Hannah Arendt calls an appetite for love for its own sake, refers to the will to “have and to hold,” our love in/for/through rhetoric always seems to slip from capture. So much so that after a whirl of scholarship that attempts to wed or to divorce rhetoric from a definitive purpose, from its technē, we must now let the lids of our eyes fold into a softer gaze. What do we want of rhetoric? At last, it spills over: “I want you to be.”1We are invited into this vulnerability, to voice such a confession, in Mari Lee Mifsud's Rhetoric of the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication. This book—itself a living form of rhetorical gift/giving—in some way revisits very traditional themes of the ethics and sociality of communication and does so within the canonically sanctioned context of classical antiquity. That said, it possesses a far more adventurous spirit than do missionary readings of Aristotle's Rhetoric. For Mifsud, the possibilities of gift/giving in communication spread beyond exchange and art; she explores rhetoric's gift/giving as “prior to and in excess of art, not as some rudimentary system of relating that awaits systematic and philosophical development, but as some thing, some event, some movement, other than art, other than technē, incommensurable even, meaning outside the system of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures, meaning other than signification, other than symbols, yet always already within and functioning” (3–4). In these first pages, Mifsud gently loosens rhetoric from the grip of its application. Should we not want it for our own desired ends, should we let it move, rhetoric in/as/through gift/giving gives back to us new ways of thinking about communication as in and outside of word exchange, both stirring inside and brimming over technē.Among the multiple gifts/givens that “rhetoric of and as gift” offers is that it frees us to openly explore the relationship between language and love, two creatures who have long been twisted together in the corner. Love in/for/through rhetoric is spoken just above a whisper by Mifsud (such secrecy may be well matched to the ethereal relationship she draws between rhetoric and the gift). “What Aristotle himself called happiness, Cixous, jouissance, Schrag, love, Spivak, care, and Johnstone, freedom” is draped by her more explicit elaboration of “giving rhetoric” as poiesis, creative and generative practice (11). In this vein, Mifsud gathers her chapters around three interlaced topics: 1) creative rather than technical critical orientation; 2) the gift's sacrifice for/by communication; and 3) gift/giving rhetoric as relationality that makes way for the polis. She takes up these topics through an examination of Homeric gift/givens in Aristotle's Rhetoric that have up to this point been a hushed dimension of the field's work. In so doing, Mifsud both explains (in excess) and performs (poetic) rhetoric of and as gift, giving way to a “creative consciousness, capable of what Cixous calls “Other-love” (148). In short, Mifsud's articulations of the “and” that dwells between “rhetoric and the gift” allows us as critics and citizens to imagine and practice love in language by letting whatever is other be.An aside dedicated to (the technē of) exorida, the (art of) beginning, and a moment for reaching shared understanding: it would both betray and misrepresent Mifsud's insights to here tidily align each chapter with creative historiography, sacrifice, and givens in the polis. As she is committed to letting the poetic emerge and exhibit, Mifsud's footing in her project is not steady, and the reader swerves behind her shifts. Therefore, this review wanders more thematically than chronologically. It slides amid subjects, and it invites further wandering. Yes, the task of “review” remains at hand, however the occasion calls, too, for embracing logos as “a gathering,” an “invitation to you to see what you might see, to be free, … to imagine all the more to be imagined” (55). Echoing what is familiar but doing so in a way that allows what is being said to nonetheless be experienced as new is, after all, the function of Homeric poiesis.2Mifsud continuously pronounces distinctions between creative and technical orientations, between Homeric and technical rhetoric, and so tempts her readers to believe that there must be some contest between rhetoric that is contained and rhetoric that is allowed to be in excess; however, she is very clear throughout her book that poiesis is not anti-technē. That is, poetic gifts/givens pulsate in carefully composed expressions and, at the same time, exceed them. Her traversing of these planes, as she all the while welcomes any surprise that comes from their movements, indicates a creative rather than technical orientation toward thought, language, and other, fully appreciating the gift rather than reflexively tucking it behind organization and argumentation. This is not to say that operating from a technical orientation erases the poetic; it simply emphasizes a means-to-an-end approach at the expense of letting the poetic come into view. As Mifsud puts it, technical thinking/writing/acting entails “an exacting efficiency to achieve the end of reason” without yielding to its excess (19).Mifsud articulates this difference in the first chapter through a focused comparison of how Homer and Aristotle have been historicized as rhetorical figures. Here she takes issue with technical historiographical interpretations of Homer, which depict him as “being a poet with a run-on style” and lacking rationality. Technical language reveals “a complex mind capable of abstract and critical thinking,” and thus Homer is seen as “primitive” (20). The technical historiographic interpretations of Homer are not just considered “technical” because of their emphasis on technē (for Homer's so-called failure to contribute a technē of rhetoric may be attributed to the mistake of counting him among rhetoricians to begin with) but because they measure Homer against Aristotle's view of rhetoric, certain defined preconditions for the rhetorical, and the particular demands of the polis. That is, evaluations of Homer on these grounds affirm the authority of Rhetoric and position Homer as the negative, the other whose form can only be traced recognized when aligned with what forms of rhetoric are presumed proper (21–22). Mifsud asks what an affirmative attitude toward Homer would offer to rhetoric: reconsidering Homeric gifts/giving and their relationship to language and being blends and blurs the borders of rhetoric solidified by technē, fixations on the logical, the figurative, and the representative (25–26). She spends the remaining chapters of the book performing a “creative historiographic” approach for the purposes of exploring how Homer contributes otherwise to our understanding of rhetoric. Put differently (here she borrows from Deleuze), Mifsud seeks to “deterritorialize” what we know of rhetoric, all the while appreciating that ultimately rhetoric will be “reterritorialized” by way of technē (28). “Such a creative orientation toward history and theory writing allows for rhetoric, in acknowledgment and performance of the gift, to offer a return to itself to and in excess of exchange” (30).Commitment to a creative orientation to the rhetorical calls for giving (in)to the excess of language and yielding to the multiple experiences a poetic rhetorical act makes possible; such an orientation immediately transforms the relationship the rhetor has with words, who is no longer bound up by purpose or utilization but allowed to roam. It also transforms the rhetor's relationship with the addressee for whom the words were uttered. Poiesis puts to bed any expectations that a message or meaning is transmitted or even merely “understood;” instead, language (and the other sharing in it) enjoys the loving liberty that comes from being let to be. Mifsud describes this “hospitable” rhetor in Deleuzian terms as no longer an author but a production studio undergoing wholly creative labor without method or rules (146). And, for hospitality's sake, the giving rhetor/rhetoric as gift must demand some sacrifice. Sacrifice “informs the gift and is an effect of the gift. To give requires sacrifice of some sort, for to give is to give away, to let go” (95). A creative relationship to rhetoric requires a radical openness to/with language, as it requires letting the other pull from our words whatever he or she sees in the expression without the rhetor burdening him or her with what it really means, and thus Homer is the personification of this giving.Specifically, Homer plays host to Aristotle. Homer is referred to and relied on throughout the Rhetoric, but he is not exactly paid homage (95, 100). Sacrifice explicitly requires the giving away of goods hard to come by and a giving away of self—Aristotle sacrifices Homer by “circulat[ing] only the thinnest slivers of Homeric doxa,” compressing vivid scenes from his epics into “sound bites” that fit the defined purpose of rhetorical technē (96), and by sacrificing the “poet” himself to “the new signification of rhetor, more in line with the norms and needs of classical technē” (100). Mifsud is very clear that Aristotle's sacrifice of Homer, Homeric givens, and poiesis “should not be considered an abuse of Homer. Homeric hospitality is unconcerned with exploitation by the one in receipt of its gift, and by virtue of poiesis, even though the poetic is reduced by Aristotle to prose more fitting for the technical, “we have no ‘true’ Homer' … to recover” (96). Homer, agnostic toward himself and his creation, makes his offerings without acknowledgment as such or obligation to reciprocate or to receive in any so-called appropriate manner (the sort of offering Aristotle names kharis in his Rhetoric). Aristotle's appropriation of Homer marks the taking place of giving rhetoric, and just as Homer's epics inhabit Aristotle's Rhetoric (however subtly), just as poiesis sighs between technē's articulations, the gift/giving gives rise to and nurtures the rhetorical.Nonetheless Mifsud remarks that our memory of rhetoric's foundations in the gift/giving has faded. Its appearance has been stamped over repeatedly by “procedural operation” and “technical knowledge,” even in the polis, the place where men supposedly show themselves for who they truly are (103). At this point, after insisting for over one hundred pages that poiesis has never really abandoned rhetoric, even if it just faintly glows in the face of technē, Mifsud mourns poiesis as if it has been lost, given away to the “service of technē.” Its dissolution in our interactions with others is tragic: “Things and people in a polis culture are related through distant, abstract mechanisms of power rather than personal relations, through technical proceduralism and utility more so than through hospitality and honor.” The forfeiting of the poetic to the technical not only restrains creativity capacity and limits our access to worlds yet known through language but also transforms communication from a medium through which we come to know and love the other into a barrier wedged between the self and other (103).With the erosion of rhetoric as gift/giving by “end-driven goals,” the other does not appear at all except as a commodity, one whom the rhetor seeks to win over, to persuade, to possess as a means to securing the rhetor's own ambitions and aims. In sum, rhetoric drained of the poetic, rhetoric made into merely “a technical apparatus to secure judgment,” is rhetoric drained of its ethical and genuinely political dimension (104). This dramatic warning against forgetting Homer raises some crucial questions about the polis in the midst of the field's ongoing romanticization of civic discourse, democracy, and justice. Mifsud grants that these matters are indeed worthy of attention but maintains that they neither can nor should dictate rhetoric's expanse (104). It would be fair to say that Mifsud does not ask that we abandon our idealistic vision of the polis but to embrace it more tightly, and forging such intimacy, she suggests, is possible only by recognizing the limits of technē and reaching into its excess, where the poetic lies in waiting.In the latter portion of her book, Mifsud is most lucid about the stakes of her appeals to recover rhetorical gift/giving. When the rhetorical is curbed by a sought-after result, when the other is not to be seen or acknowledged through rhetoric but possessed by it for the purpose of policy, allegiance, lawfulness, equality, and so forth, the ethical and political relations made possible in and through language are compromised. It is beside the point that these purposes may be valuable or good; “possession” is the operative phrase: renouncing Homeric poiesis directs our visions and capacities only toward a “particular order of things” at the expense of recognition of the other qua other and at the expense of recognizing language as such.3 It feels as though Mifsud is calling for rhetoricians to reclaim the poetic in order to remember rhetoric's origins in the gift, thereby radically rethinking what sort of inquiry rhetoric should take up and how we engage in our questions together through the written and spoken word. Do we revitalize the subject of style? Are we now obliged to open our understanding of publics in a way that intimates rhetoric gift/giving? Maybe. Whatever instruction Mifsud leaves to her reader is confused by her compulsory bow to Derrida's critique of gift giving (127, 139–43, 161). “The archaic Homeric gift economy is not our savior,” she assures (143).But if the rhetorical is concerned with the question of language and (love of) the other, why not heed Homer's example as host? Mifsud's most compelling contribution is a critique of the ways we indefinitely affix argument, persuasion, policy, and democracy to rhetoric's art; or, put differently, the ways in which we have only asked after how language can serve our self-determined appearances or preconceived designs and purposes. The gift/giving rhetoric requests at last (as it always has) to let the question of language—language as a question—surface, to let it shimmer in the expression of the other, to let it ring in the other's voice. True, this is a matter of love. Never mind that gifts may implicate language or the other in a reciprocal exchange. Should we be wary to let language in turn give voice? Through this thesis we approach a Levinasian dream, whereby the other finds himself in (the other's) expression, and the other is recognized in an intimate state, already giving of herself. This is not obligation so much as a joining, a touching and being touched. Mifsud is thus too humble in her final appeals: the spectacular transformation of our relationship to language that Rhetoric and the Gift performs—throwing back into question what we know/that we have ever actually known/whether we can ever know rhetoric's potential—is the necessary beginning of loving an other and of loving the world.
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Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article presents the outline of a rhetorical theory that allows us to take Nietzsche's statements that “all language is rhetorical” and that “language is entirely the product of the rhetorical art” literally, not as a hyperbole or metaphor. Nietzsche argues that the normativity of the human world canonized by scientific and philosophical taxonomy and logic is but a makeshift edifice of metaphors—habituated prejudices that humans take to be norms by suppressing the fact that they are but the residue of a primordial rhetorical activity. In this sense, scientists speak metaphorically, overlooking their own axiomatic bias, while poets speak literally, drawing on unbiased and defamiliarized “first impressions.” Human cognition, rigged by the homogenizing abstractions of metaphors, can thus be rebooted by the rhetorical art and thereby reconnected with the shared physiological roots of empathy and language. The newly empowered competence for achieving bias-free, unprejudiced, free thinking is rhetorical heuristics.
January 2018
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Abstract
“Algorithms function as information brokers that manage, control, and direct the content that platform users can search and access; in doing so, they exert rhetorical influence by determining what information matters and is available to researchers, and by providing that information across the many interfaces of the platform.”
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Abstract
As a conceptual resource for rhetoric, contemporary neuroscience has considerable potential. Yet how exactly rhetoricians should deploy it as such requires careful consideration. While some engage neuroscience in a foundationalist fashion, using it to ground rhetoric in empirically tested claims, I make the case for a non-foundationalist approach, arguing that neuroscience can serve as a resource for rhetoric on the basis of epistemologies that value the speculative, indeterminate, and contingent. That is, we can use neuroscience to achieve perspective rather than proof and continued conversation rather than resolution. More specifically, I suggest placing neuroscience in incongruous contact with rhetoric, using it to achieve Burkean perspective by incongruity. I then do so in an extended example that puts Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis in incongruous contact with ancient accounts of <em>eikos</em>, thereby offering a fresh angle from which to view enduring discussions anew.
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Abstract
Shannon Walters’ Rhetorical Touch stretches the consideration of embodied rhetorics to embrace the sense of touch through both classical rhetoric and contemporary disability studies. Key to Walters’ project is a rereading of Aristotle’s pisteis—logos, pathos, and ethos—through the sense of touch. To examine the productions of a variety of disabled rhetors, she draws upon rhetoricians from Empedocles to Burke, on phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and on disability-studies scholars such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. This broad, disciplinary-crossing quality of her scholarship makes sense because she situates touch as “a sense that transcends bodily boundaries; it demands an approach that also transcends boundaries” (8). Though her project is solidly within the realm of disability studies, it can and should affect how we do scholarship in rhetoric.Through an understanding of Empedocles’ sense of logos, Walters argues that touch is the broadest means of persuasion, and, furthermore, that it is the sense that ties all humans together, those who are disabled as well as those who are temporarily able-bodied. In so doing, Walters calls for a radical repositioning of all rhetorical appeals as fundamentally rooted in the sense of touch. This is the most radical and fascinating claim of the book, and it holds up for both individual rhetors as well as amorphous rhetors who are harder to identify. Walters not only uses this understanding of rhetoric to guide examination of Helen Keller, Temple Grandin, and Nancy Mairs, but also in her examination of the birth of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s through the 1977 demonstrations for the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. At times, her broad historical and theoretical approach weaves together unevenly, but the overarching argument’s contribution to reimagining pisteis is solid and perhaps even groundbreaking.The first chapter examines the tactile experience of Helen Keller’s rhetorical productions through a careful consideration of her texts, the context in which they were produced, and the theoretical implications of her practice. A facet of this chapter that I found particularly relevant and insightful was Walter’s examination of the doubt of authenticity and individual authorship that accompanied all of Keller’s writings. Walters reads the accusations of plagiarism against Keller as stemming directly from Keller’s relationship to communication as tactile and inherently collaborative. Though Keller is an exceptional example of these facets of rhetorical production, we all draw on sources we have absorbed unknowingly, on collaboration with present and distant others, and on a tactile experience. Walters argues we thus must reshape rhetoric to account for this dynamic. To do so, she literally redraws the traditional rhetorical triangle into a doubled triangle, forming either a diamond with an entire side “touching,” representing both traditional ethos and her reinterpretation through mêtis, or an angular and precarious hourglass, intersecting at the point of two interpretations of logos—Aristotle’s and Empedocles’.Chapter two examines the demonstrations by disability activists demanding enforcement of Section 504, simultaneously continuing Walters’ theoretical underpinnings, which rest on an understanding of rhetorical identification largely dependent on Burke, but shaped through theories of touch by Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and Deleuze. Walters identifies a key problem with rhetorical models of identification: they “do not accommodate the identities of people with disabilities or identifications made possible by the lived experience of disability” (62). Walters’ retheorization seeks to accommodate identification: “Specifically, identification via sensation and touch possesses the potential to reform and reshape the process of identification” (64). Walters suggests Deleuze’s concept of the “fold” as a model of Burkean identification that includes division. Though I find this chapter fascinating and ambitious, I’m left wondering why we must accommodate identification at all. This seems a retrofitting strategy and potentially less radical than an outright dismissal, or even a redefinition, as Walters does so well in her reimagining of pisteis.In the next three chapters, Walters molds the rhetorical triangle into something radically different from what our first-year composition textbooks taught us in order to be inclusive of touch and thus of disabled rhetors. Instead of Aristotle’s autonomous, rational logos, in chapter three, Walters puts forward Empedocles’ felt sense of logos, which is touch-based and enables a facilitated model of rhetoric. She finds this extralinguistic approach to logos more appropriate for rhetors with psychological disabilities and suggests that, “Empedocles’ sense of logos, felt in the heart as much as exhibited by one’s cognition, is physical, psychological, and embodied” (98). Walters then applies this reading of felt logos to online support forums for schizophrenia and depression, in which participants explicitly discuss touch and the lack of it in their lives. This reading is innovative, though perhaps limited in this online form.In the following chapter, Walters pushes her readers to reexamine how we presume an ethos that is neurotypical. She suggests, “Simply put, autistic people are seen as ethos-less when viewed through a narrowly medical or pathological lens” (113). This pathological lens casts autists as unable to identify and connect with others and therefore unable to construct ethos. In this chapter, Walters is doing her most expansive work to develop lines of thought already established in considerations of disability and of bodily knowing within our discipline, such as those developed by Debra Hawhee and Jay Dolmage, who both look to mêtis as an alternative knowledge production within rhetoric that is also based in bodily adaptation. Walters builds directly on this scholarship in order to suggest an approach to ethos that is neuro-diverse: “I redefine mêtis as a tactile relationship of embodied cognition between people and their environments that supports a method of character formation not based on traditional notions of ability and neurotypicality” (118). In this chapter, Walters makes a significant contribution to disability rhetoric as a field by showing how mêtis can accommodate those who use facilitated communication as well as those who are neuro-divergent and may use touch in nontypical ways to build trust and character.In the next chapter, Walters articulates how facility with kairos can make new forms of pathos possible: “I redefine kairos though special attention to the sense of touch, showing how kairos operates tactilely to create new emotional and physical connections among bodies in close proximity and contact” (145). Walters uses the term “redefine” in this chapter and the last in ways that may lead a reader to think she has no regard for rhetorical history. Quite to the contrary, Walters is changing perspective and illuminating a connection to touch that has always been related to the terms she is deploying. For instance, Walters notes that in the first uses of the term kairos, in Homer and Hesiod, the term is “nearly synonymous with ‘disability,’ indicating places of bodily vulnerability and impairment that are penetrable tactilely” (153). Here, Walters traces an etymology that classically may have worked to further disadvantage those who are impaired, but that in current rhetorical scholarship can call attention to the tactile and kairotic ways of employing pathos, which disabled rhetors, such as Nancy Mairs, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and John Hockenberry, have opened as rhetorical possibilities.Her final two chapters work to conclude her reexamination of rhetoric through the sense of touch. Chapter six explores the possibilities of teaching with haptic technologies. Far from an afterthought, this chapter remains deeply theoretical, engaged in historiography, and pulls together her shape-shifting pisteis within the classroom. Walters leads the reader as she leads her students through a critical investigation of haptic technologies, showing the ableist assumptions embedded within them. Not only is this investigation pertinent to disability studies, but it also models the kind of deep critical analysis we should all be guiding our students toward. Walters’ conclusion reminds us that we are all embedded in haptic technologies and the future of communication technology will only embed us further. As we critically engage technology, we need a lens through which to understand touch, which Walters has provided.Rhetorical Touch is an important contribution to the historiography of rhetoric, to rhetorical theory, to disability studies, and to composition rhetoric. I look forward to seeing how other scholars take up this reshaping of the traditional rhetorical triangle. The only disappointment I can manage to find in the book is the continued adherence to identification. However, Walters provides analytical insight and new perspectives on the tradition that are radical and inclusive of diverse bodies and minds. That is what this book offers to the world of rhetoric.
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Abstract
Background: Current research in composition and writing studies is concerned with issues of writing program evaluation and how writing tasks and their sequences scaffold students toward learning outcomes. These issues are beginning to be addressed by writing analytics research, which can be useful for identifying recurring types of language in writing assignments and how those can inform task design and student outcomes. To address these issues, this study provides a three-step method of sequencing, comparison, and diagnosis to understand how specific writing tasks fit into a classroom sequence as well as compare to larger genres of writing outside of the immediate writing classroom environment. By doing so, we provide writing program administrators with tools for describing what skills students demonstrate in a sequence of writing tasks and diagnosing how these skills match with writing students will do in later contexts. Literature Review: Student writing that responds to classroom assignments can be understood as genres, insofar as they are constructed responses that exist in similar rhetorical situations and perform similar social actions. Previous work in corpus analysis has looked at these genres, which helps us as writing instructors understand what kind of constructed responses are required of students and to make those expectations explicit. Aull (2017) examined a corpus of first-year undergraduate writing assignments in two courses to create “sociocognitive profiles” of these assignments. We analyze student writing that responds to similar writing tasks, but use a different corpus method that allows us to understand the tasks in both local and global contexts. By doing so, we gain confidence and depth in our understanding of these tasks, analyze how they sequence together, and are able to compare argumentative writing across institutions and contexts. Research Questions: Two questions guided our study: What is the trajectory of skills targeted by the sequence of tasks in the two first-year writing courses, as evidenced by the rhetorical strategies employed by the writers in successive assignments? Focusing on the final argument assignments, how similar are they to argumentative writing in other contexts, in terms of rhetorical profiles? Methodology: We first conducted a local analysis, in which we used a dictionary-based corpus method to analyze the rhetorical strategies used by writers in the first-year writing courses to understand how they built on each other to form a sequence. Having understood what skills students are demonstrating in a course, we then conducted a global analysis which calculated a “distance” between the first-year argument writing and a corpus of argument writing drawn from other contexts. Recognizing that there was a non-trivial distance, we then identified and evaluated the sources of the distance so that the writing tasks could be assessed or modified. Results: The local analysis revealed eight key rhetorical strategies that student writing exhibits between the two first-year writing courses. With this understanding, we then placed the argument writing in global contexts to find that the assignments in both courses differ somewhat from argument writing in other contexts. Upon analyzing this difference, we found that the first-year writing primarily differs in its usage of academic language, the personal register, assertive language, and reasoning. We suggest that these differences stem primarily from the rhetorical situation and learning objectives associated with first-year writing, as well as the sequencing of the courses. Discussion: The three-step method presented provides a means for writing program administrators to describe and analyze writing that students produce in their writing programs. We intend these steps to be understood as an iterative process, whereby writing programs can use these results to evaluate what rhetorical skills their students are exhibiting and to benchmark those against the program’s goals and/or other similar writing programs. Conclusions: By presenting these analyses together, we ultimately provide a cohesive method by which to analyze a writing program and benchmark students’ use of rhetorical strategies in relation to other argumentative contexts. We believe this method to be useful not only to individual writing programs, but to assessment literature broadly. In future research, we anticipate learning how this process will practically feed back into pedagogy, as well as understanding what placing writing tasks into a global context can tell us about genre theory.
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Abstract
Background: It is important for developers of automated scoring systems to ensure that their systems are as fair and valid as possible. This commitment means evaluating the performance of these systems in light of construct-irrelevant response strategies. The enhancement of systems to detect and deal with these kinds of strategies is often an iterative process, whereby as new strategies come to light they need to be evaluated and effective mechanisms built into the automated scoring systems to handle them. In this paper, we focus on the Babel system, which automatically generates semantically incohesive essays. We expect that these essays may unfairly receive high scores from automated scoring engines despite essentially being nonsense. Literature Review: We discuss literature related to gaming of automated scoring systems. One reason that Babel essays are so easy to identify as nonsense by human readers is that they lack any semantic cohesion. Therefore, we also discuss some literature related to cohesion and detecting semantic cohesion. Research Questions: This study addressed three research questions:Can we automatically detect essays generated by the Babel system?Can we integrate the detection of Babel-generated essays into an operational automated essay scoring system while making sure not to flag valid student responses?Does a general approach for detecting semantically incohesive essays also detect Babel-generated essays?Research Methodology: This article describes the creation of two corpora necessary to address the research questions: (1) a corpus of Babel-generated essays and (2) a corresponding corpus of good-faith essays. We built a classifier to distinguish Babel-generated essays from good-faith essays and investigated whether the classifier can be integrated into an automated scoring engine without adverse effects. We also developed a measure of lexical-semantic cohesion and examined its distribution in Babel and in good-faith essays.Results: We found that the classifier built on Babel-generated essays and good-faith essays and using features from the automated scoring engine can distinguish the Babel-generated essays from the good-faith ones with 100% accuracy. We also found that if we integrated this classifier into the automated scoring engine it flagged very few responses that were submitted as part of operational submissions (76 of 434,656). The responses that were flagged had previously been assigned a score of Null (non-scorable) or a score of 1 by human experts. The measure of lexical-semantic cohesion shows promise in being able to distinguish Babel-generated essays from good-faith essays.Conclusions: Our results show that it is possible to detect the kind of gaming strategy illustrated by the Babel system and add it to an automated scoring engine without adverse effects on essays seen during real high-stakes tests. We also show that a measure of lexical-semantic cohesion can separate Babel-generated essays from good-faith essays to a certain degree, depending on task. This points to future work that would generalize the capability to detect semantic incoherence in essays. Directions for Further Research: Babel-generated essays can be identified and flagged by an automated scoring system without any adverse effects on a large set of good-faith essays. However, this is just one type of gaming strategy. It is important for developers of automated scoring systems to continue to be diligent about expanding the construct coverage of their systems in order to prevent weaknesses that can be exploited by tools such as Babel. It is also important to focus on the underlying linguistic reasons that lead to nonsense sentences. Successful identification of such nonsense would lead to improved automated scoring and feedback.
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Abstract
Background: Employing natural language processing and latent semantic analysis, the current work was completed as a constituent part of a larger research project for designing and launching artificial intelligence in the form of deep artificial neural networks. The models were evaluated on a proprietary corpus retrieved from a data warehouse, where it was extracted from MyReviewers, a sophisticated web application purposed for peer review in written communication, which was actively used in several higher education institutions. The corpus of laboratory reports in STEM annotated by instructors and students was used to train the models. Under the Common Rule, research ethics were ensured by protecting the privacy of subjects and maintaining the confidentiality of data, which mandated corpus de-identification.Literature Review: De-identification and pseudonymization of textual data remains an actively studied research question for several decades. Its importance is stipulated by numerous laws and regulations in the United States and internationally with HIPAA Privacy Rule and FERPA.Research Question: Text de-identification requires a significant amount of manual post-processing for eliminating faculty and student names. This work investigated automated and semi-automated methods for de-identifying student and faculty entities while preserving author names in cited sources and reference lists. It was hypothesized that a natural language processing toolkit and an artificial neural network model with named entity recognition capabilities would facilitate text processing and reduce the amount of manual labor required for post-processing after matching essays to a list of users’ names. The suggested techniques were applied with supplied pre-trained models without additional tagging and training. The goal of the study was to evaluate three approaches and find the most efficient one among those using a users’ list, a named entity recognition toolkit, and an artificial neural network.Research Methodology: The current work studied de-identification of STEM laboratory reports and evaluated the performance of the three techniques: brute forth search with a user lists, named entity recognition with the OpenNLP machine learning toolkit, and NeuroNER, an artificial neural network for named entity recognition built on the TensorFlow platform. The complexity of the given task was determined by the dilemma, where names belonging to students, instructors, or teaching assistants must be removed, while the rest of the names (e.g., authors of referenced papers) must be preserved.Results: The evaluation of the three selected methods demonstrated that automating de-identification of STEM lab reports is not possible in the setting, when named entity recognition methods are employed with pre-trained models. The highest results were achieved by the users’ list technique with 0.79 precision, 0.75 recall, and 0.77 F1 measure, which significantly outweighed OpenNLP with 0.06 precision, 0.14 recall, and 0.09 F1, and NeuroNER with 0.14 precision, 0.56 recall, and 0.23 F1.Discussion: Low performance of OpenNLP and NeuroNER toolkits was explained by the complexity of the task and unattainability of customized models due to imposed time constraints. An approach for masking possible de-identification errors is suggested.Conclusion: Unlike multiple cases described in the related work, de-identification of laboratory reports in STEM remained a non-trivial labor-intensive task. Applied out of the box, a machine learning toolkit and an artificial neural network technique did not enhance performance of the brute forth approach based on user list matching.Directions for Future Research: Customized tagging and training on the STEM corpus were presumed to advance outcomes of machine learning and predominantly artificial intelligence methods. Application of other natural language toolkits may lead to deducing a more effective solution.
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Abstract
The historical relationship between Judaism and Islam has been the subject of scholarly inquiry for decades. Until recently, however, this fourteen-century-old relationship has gone unremarked on by theorists and historians of rhetoric. In this article, I explore the interconnectivities between legal rhetoric in Judaism and Islam. Looking at the Nicomachaean Ethics and Chaim Perelman’s analysis of rhetoric, justice, and law, I first investigate how, like Aristotle, Jewish and Muslim jurists link virtuousness to obedience to the law. Then, I show how sharia and halakha, Islamic and Jewish law, use rhetoric and systematic argumentation to articulate the place of law in the lives of Muslims and Jews. Finally, using the medieval Mamluk Sultanate and the Geniza community as the basis of a comparatist rhetorical analysis, I demonstrate the lived interconnectedness of Judeo-Muslim legal rhetorics pertaining to marriage, divorce, and the juristic agency of medieval Mediterranean women.
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Abstract
Native to ancient dialogues, medieval allegories, and early modern iconologies, Rhetorica has come to represent rhetoric as an area of academic inquiry. In this essay, we consider how contemporary rhetorical scholars and organizations have used Rhetorica and explore the potential of other personifications of rhetoric and persuasion, drawing on rhetoric’s histories to supply new inventive resources for rhetorical inquiry. First, we introduce lesser-known depictions of Rhetorica. Her range gives historical grounding to a scholarly imaginary that has moved beyond yet still uses Mantegna’s Rhetorica. We do not urge rhetoricians to select a new face for the discipline but instead to recognize Rhetorica’s own diversity and history as an on-going aid and asset to rhetorical thinking and theorizing. Second, we advocate a shift from an exclusive focus on Rhetorica to a shared focus on her less disciplinarily profuse predecessor, Peithō (persuasion).
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Abstract
Readers of A Rhetoric of Motives often acknowledge Burke’s anti-feminist blind spots, but argue that these blind spots need not negate his larger contributions to rhetorical theory. While true, this claim is also dangerous because it assumes that identifying an argumentative blind spot is tantamount to having worked through all its complexities. This article attempts to work through these complexities via a method of mythic historiography grounded in Burke’s concept of the almost universal. This article demonstrates that Burke organizes his philosophy of modern rhetoric and his concept of identification around a deceitful Woman trope in ways that claim a universality that is actually gendered male. By reimagining the relation of identification and myth in A Rhetoric of Motives this article refigures the deceitful Woman trope in terms of its unassimilability within Burke’s modern philosophy of rhetoric and discusses implications for rhetorical studies.
2018
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Abstract
Informed by my embodiment as a Deaf instructor asking hearing students to challenge captioning conventions, this article shows how hearing composers can reimagine the design of their captioned videos, and appreciate students’ embodied responses to new rhetorical situations. The embodied methodology and methods in this article incorporate embodied differences and are directly influenced by the fields of disability studies, cultural rhetorics, and embodiment. This article foregrounds students’ embodied responses—their individual reactions to the videos and activities—in the form of their reflective letters on the process of designing and analyzing videos with dynamic visual text, or captions that move around the screen in interaction with other modes of communication. In addition to discussing their written responses and the skills they developed, I assess their group videos to show how student composers interpret the process of infusing captions with meaning.
December 2017
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The Counsel of the Fox. Examples of Counsel from the Commedia, Short Stories, Letters and Treatises ↗
Abstract
If the aim of argumentation is that of increasing acceptance of the orator’s thesis (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 49), then the ultimate goal of counsel, a widespread argumentative practice within the genres of discourse as well as literature, is indeed persuasion. The subject of this essay—that is, the rhetoric of counsel—allows us to observe the interpretative richness of this element of the “new rhetoric” through examples offered by Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Lucrezia Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli, straddling the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, bridging the fi elds of literature and history.
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Abstract
This article responds to the proliferation of fake news in today’s media by considering how a rhetorical theory and pedagogy more deeply grounded in a rethinking of vulnerability might help us as rhetoricians and writing scholars to address fake news as more than just dis-informative rhetoric. In the first part, I bring together scholarship from within and outside of rhetoric and writing studies in order to frame vulnerability as a fundamental component of all rhetorical encounters. In the second part, I propose the use of trolling rhetoric as an object of analysis that may help students better understand how deceptive and disruptive genres of discourse (including, but not limited to, fake news) may, in the process of trying to exploit our rhetorical vulnerability, actually call attention to this crucial aspect of rhetorical encounters.
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Abstract
Reviews Cristina Pepe, The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. xviii + 618 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-24984-4 When I review a book that is of high quality, I like to read it twice before submitting the review. That does not excuse the inordinate length of time it has taken me to review Cristina Pepe's Genres of Rhetorical Speeches, for which I apologise to the author, but it immediately indicates my admiration for the book. I shall outline its contents, before making a few observations, all of which are offered in a constructive spirit. The book consists (suitably, given its theme) of three parts, followed by an extensive list of Testimonia, an Appendix, Bibliography, Index of Greek and Latin Terms, Index Locorum, and a General Index. Part One covers the fifth and fourth centuries, opening with an overview of the contexts of speechmaking in Greece and, of course, in particular Athens. Separate chapters address the practice of the Sophists (with an inevitable focus on Gorgias and the Helen, supplemented by observations on the ori gins of the praise speech); Thucydides (deliberative oratory, with an anal ysis of the Mytilenean Debate in Book 3); Plato (analyses of the Gorgias, Phaedrus and Sophist, and of Plato's conception of advice and praise); Isocrates (in particular how he defines his logoi); Demosthenes (his distinc tion between deliberative and judicial); and, in greater detail, the Rhetoric to Alexander (with a discussion of genres and species, and of the connected and complex ascription of the treatise to Anaximenes, without committing herself either way). Part Two is of roughly the same length as Part One, but focuses on one author only: Aristotle. Rhetorical development, including in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrian, all led to the Rhetoric, which for Pepe was Greek rhetoric's 'crowning theoretical achievement' (p. 123; I note that this repeats the earlier judgment of Laurent Pernot in the English translation of his Rhetoric in Antiquity, 'the crowning achievement of rhetorical theory in Classical Greece', p. 41), though the dates of composition of the Rhetoric to Alexander and the Rhetoric were not necessarily linear. Most will not quib ble with Pepe's concentration on the Rhetoric, even if we need to bear in mind Pernot's assessment that 'this treatise full of novel views was rela tively little read in antiquity' (Rhetoric in Antiquity p. 44). Pepe examines Rhetorica, Vol. XXXV, Issue 1, pp. 110-120. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2017 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: / /www.ucpress. edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.L110. Reviews 111 the system of genres in the Rhetoric in minute and instructive detail, pay ing a great deal of attention to epideictic, which Rhetoric scholars agree Aristotle introduced 'as a genre in its own right' (p. 144), but also indicat ing the 'aspects of originality with respect to tradition' of his treatment of the deliberative genre (p. 159). Very helpful chapters on the different topics that are used in the three genres (Chapter Twelve), and on the style and arrangement of the genres (Chapter Thirteen), precede a final chapter in this Part on the relatively little-studied treatise, the Divisiones Aristoteleae. Part Three takes us through the Hellenistic period and into Rome (the title Rhetorical Genres in the Hellenistic and Imperial Ages' perhaps does not do full justice to the material on the Roman Republican period). This might be thought the least satisfying of the three parts, not because of any lack of knowledge, hut simply because it covers, inevitably in less detail, such a wide range of material, in Greek and Tatin, from Hellenistic theory to the proyyninasmata and declamation (Chapter Twenty). There is thus no individual chapter on Cicero or Quintilian, rather an approach that looks at topics from a combined Greek and Roman angle, such as the vocabulary used for each of the three genres...
November 2017
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Abstract
I begin with an anecdote. While a senior at a small liberal arts college, I participated in a year-long senior seminar on evolution. The central questions were how we come to be human and, more basically, what it means to be human. Units were taught from the perspectives of biology, various traditions of philosophy, theology, education, history, and world literature. Faculty were drawn from across the curriculum, each taking units and assigning readings from their discipline that addressed our central questions from an evolutionary perspective. Importantly, the faculty leading seminar discussions also attended each session, so that every meeting possessed the possibility of full-scale intellectual battle not only with and among the students but (oh joy!) among the esteemed faculty. The first unit was led by two biologists who assigned Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species (1845) and Theodosius Dobzhansky's Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955). Ours being a Jesuit institution, we were required to enroll in eighteen credits of philosophy, twelve of which had to center on Thomism or related topics, along with sixteen hours of theology. We students were curious as to how the priests, especially, would respond to an evolutionary perspective that did not begin with a creator and had humans crawling out of the genetic swamp's primordial ooze, so to speak.We were not disappointed. In fact, when we detected that norms of civility and decorum were keeping pointed disputation in check, we asked sniggling questions, having learned from our Jesuitical training how to be provocateurs. Although there is nothing remarkable to recount from their disagreements, because we had been educated by Jesuits we understood perspective meant everything, and the seminar's jousts were nothing if not contests waged from divergent starting points. What does linger is a question born of the way the biologists were appropriating Darwin and Dobzhansky, pushing them beyond scientific inquiry to address existential considerations. The dissonance between what we assumed motivated a scientist's disciplinary curiosity and the way these scientists were thinking prompted a humanist in our class to query one of our professors as to why he studied biology. His answer was that he thought it gave him his best shot at understanding what it means to be a human being. We had not anticipated that. Pursuing science to answer ontological and metaphysical questions about being seemed at odds with our curriculum's foundational appropriation of the ratio studorum to achieve a specific (moral) perspective on the world and on human existence most particularly through theology, philosophy, and literary subjects. Our professor's answer accepted the humanistic values of a Jesuit education while affirming there were many roads to Rome. To oversimplify, it reinforced the search for productive perspectives, such that when considering multiple paths to understanding (more on this later), the question was not which road you took, but a) whether the road led to your destination, and b) what you discovered along the way.Ever since Greek antiquity, rhetoric has been understood as an art of influencing audiences through arguments, emotions, and character; through persuasion (movere), instruction (docere), or delight (delectare). Moreover, that art has been understood as both a regime of instruction (docens) and use (utens). Without passing into the sociology of knowledge, it is worth spending a moment to remind ourselves of rhetoric's complex history. I focus on rhetoric because, as the journal's founding statement suggests, Philosophy and Rhetoric is concerned with rhetoric as a philosophical category. We are led to ask, therefore, what it means to be a “philosophical category.” In its most basic sense, it is a domain of speculation about philosophy's first principles, about its relationship to how we come to understand our world (epistemology) and experience (ethics), and possibly it is related to our being in the world (ontology). But it also can mean to be under the rule of a superordinate system of thought, of philosophy itself—whatever that might be, whatever that might mean.In 1949, P. Albert Duhamel published his important essay “The Function of Rhetoric as Effective Expression.” Duhamel followed the intellectual fashion of the day, which emphasized interpreting historical texts in terms of their antecedent influences. He argued that a milieu of metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological assumptions gives each theory of rhetoric its unique character and distinguishes it from relatives distant and near. No single idea of rhetoric embraces all others; they share only a concern for effective expression. Although written nearly 70 years ago, Duhamel's position remains an important interpretive stance. His theses that individual rhetorics must be read in terms of their presuppositions and that all rhetorics share an abiding concern for effective expression are particularly relevant to the challenge that was first undertaken by this journal fifty years ago to explore the intersections of philosophy and rhetoric and that it continues to emphasize today.There is much to admire in Duhamel's argument, especially its resistance to a certain type of reductionism in his reasoned defense of plural rhetorics and the methodological rigor his analysis advances for distinguishing among rhetorics. Still, Duhamel's argument carries problematic implications. Reading a theory in terms of its metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological presuppositions implies that we can read a text “correctly.” Whether there can be a single, “correct” interpretation of a rich rhetorical treatise is doubtful, given the inherent polysemy of such texts and the gap between original and historically distant interpretations of context that distorts our efforts to recover what lies beneath time's erasure. In addition, Duhamel's suggested approach to rhetorical treatises strongly implies that rhetorics are derived from antecedent philosophical positions. This begs a still hotly contested question that dates from rhetoric's original theoretical formulations by the elder Sophists. Finally, even though Duhamel's argument construes rhetorical theory as deriving from philosophy, it implies deep philosophical ambivalence toward rhetoric because the practices it theorizes are not entirely trustworthy. Rhetorical discourse aims at effectiveness, not eternal truth. Consequently, most philosophical stances have difficulty accommodating a theoretical treatise on rhetoric without reference to their own philosophic positions, which valorize the eternally true, or at least an orientation toward truth, and its discursive prerequisite of trustworthy speech.The historical benchmark for these problems is found in the quarrel between Gorgias and Plato. Gorgias celebrated the psychagogic powers of language, while Plato lamented the consequences of an abandoned quest for truth. Plato regarded philosophy to be a quest for eternal truth through reasoned arguments, while Sophists and rhetors sought mere probabilities through sensory engagement structured by phantasia and mimesis (Plato, Gorgias 464a–466a). Consequently, Plato regarded the only acceptable rhetoric to be one brought to heel by submitting first to dialectic in order to secure its claims (Plato, Phaedrus 262c, 266b, 269c–274b, 277b–c).The Gorgias-Plato quarrel highlights lingering issues for establishing an intellectual stance between philosophy and rhetoric: How are we to understand the power of words? 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(Dis)Identifying as Writers, Scholars, and Researchers: Former Schoolteachers’ Professional Identity Work during Their Teacher-Education Doctoral Studies ↗
Abstract
Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.
September 2017
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Abstract
In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.
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Abstract
ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”
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In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.
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Abstract
Background: This study examines the generic structure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, which are becoming standard practice for corporate communication of social and environmental performance beyond financial disclosure. Literature review: Genre theories provide a framework for exploring genres contextualized in different cultures. Based on the English for Specific Purposes approach of genre analysis, this study compares the move structure of CSR reports in Italian, Chinese, and English from a corpus-based perspective. Research questions: 1. What are the main moves used in CSR reports? 2. Are there any cross-cultural similarities or variations in terms of generic features? Methodology: Combining genre theories with concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics, we designed an observational framework for move identification. Based on a 15-move scheme, we annotated 18 CSR reports for comparative analysis. Results and conclusions: The CSR report is characterized by rhetorical recursivity and hybridity of speech acts: beyond “reporting” and “presenting,” it is also “demonstrating,” “evaluating,” and “committing.”As a globally established genre, it presents noticeable generic similarity in different languages, suggesting that the communicative purposes of CSR reports are recognized by different cultures. The top six moves in the Performance-reporting section of the CSR reports present identical trends in terms of extensiveness ranking in all three languages. Cross-cultural variations mainly involve the use of optional moves, such as the dominant use of the move “Presenting individual cases” in the Chinese sample. The observational framework for move identification may also be transferable to other genres. The limitations of this study include the sample size and the absence of an author survey. Future research could investigate the CSR report from a diachronic perspective, to explore how its genre structure has developed over time.
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Book Review| September 01 2017 Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication. By Mari Lee Mifsud. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016; pp. xi + 186. $25.00 paper. Michele Kennerly Michele Kennerly Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (3): 557–560. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.3.0557 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michele Kennerly; Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Contemporary Communication. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2017; 20 (3): 557–560. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.3.0557 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
This article reads several unpublished poems written by Kenneth Burke as influenced by George Meredith's 1877 Essay on Comedy . It argues that critics have expected too much of Burke's comic criticism, as Meredith restricted comedy to a narrow social realm. Contrary to an understanding of Burke's poetry as "arhetorical," the poems reflect social awareness informed by Meredith. However, Burke's internalization of Meredith sometimes inclined Burke to the bitterness of satire.
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This article reads several unpublished poems written by Kenneth Burke as influenced by George Meredith's 1877 Essay on Comedy . It argues that critics have expected too much of Burke's comic criticism, as Meredith restricted comedy to a narrow social realm. Contrary to an understanding of Burke's poetry as "arhetorical," the poems reflect social awareness informed by Meredith. However, Burke's internalization of Meredith sometimes inclined Burke to the bitterness of satire.
August 2017
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This article asks that we take seriously (and suggests that we have not yet taken seriously enough) Steven B. Katz's point that nonhuman rhetoric is “supplanting and replacing the physical human body” as the main site for rhetorical agency. Discussing Ian Bogost's carpentry and James J. Brown Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers's adaptation of it as rhetorical carpentry as an example of nonhuman rhetoric that does not go far enough, I suggest that Joanna Zylinska's concept of “scalar derangement”—the pathological need to put all things on a human scale—is a major impasse for a nonhuman rhetoric founded on representational methods. Instead, I offer a model of rhetorical invocation and suggest that skotison, Richard Lanham's term for deliberately obfuscatory style, provides a rhetorical practice for addressing the nonhuman at nonhuman scales. Instead of a nonhuman rhetoric of things, I maintain that in the age of climate change we should begin to consider an inhuman rhetoric.
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This article uses a lengthy critique of Kenneth Burke's Attitudes Toward History found in the Kenneth Burke Papers as well as Kenneth Burke's published writing to argue for a more expansive view of his comic theory, one that sees Burke's comic theory as a basis for ethical rhetorical engagement. Rather than defining the comic as a Burkean rhetorical device that is relevant to only a select number of texts and situations, this account of Burke's comic theory suggests it has broad applicability. Engaging Burke's comic theory as an ethic allows for active, generous, exigent, and self-reflective scholarship.