All Journals

619 articles
Year: Topic: Clear
Export:
rhetorical theory ×

July 2000

  1. Kairos in Aristotle's Rhetoric
    Abstract

    Many authorities have come to recognize the critical importance of the Greek notion of kairos (right timing and due measure) in contemporary rhetoric. But Aristotelian scholars have generally ignored or demeaned Aristotle's use of kairos in his rhetoric, often contrasting it especially to Plato's full treatment in the Phaedrus. This lack of attention has been partially due to faulty indexes or concordances, which have recently been corrected by Wartelle and programs like PERSEUS and IBICUS. Secondly, no one has hitherto attempted to go beyond the root kair- and examine the concept as expressed in other terms. This article will attempt to meet both of these concerns. It will first examine care-fully the 16 references to kairos in the Rhetoric and show that the term is an integral element in Aristotle's own act of writing, in his concept of the pathetic argument, and in his handling of maxims and integration. There are also important passages using kairos in his treatment of style, often in conjunction with his use of the notion of propriety or fitness (to prepon). Possibly the two most important indirect uses of the concept of kairos can be seen in Aristotle's definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and the Nichomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

    doi:10.1177/0741088300017003005

June 2000

  1. ‘Aristotle's pharmacy’: The medical rhetoric of a clinical protocol in the drug development process
    Abstract

    This article analyzes the clinical protocol within the rhetorical framework of the drug development and approval process, identifying the constraints under which the protocol is written and the rhetorical form, argumentative strategies, and style needed to improve and teach the writing of this document.

    doi:10.1080/10572250009364699
  2. <i>Mimesis</i>between poetics and rhetoric: Performance culture and civic education in Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay argues that the genealogy of the schism between poetics and rhetoric can be understood best by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle towards the social impact of the poetic tradition with those of Isocrates. Plato seeks to discipline the process of poetic and political enculturation by splitting mimesis as representation from mimesis as performative imitation and audience identification. Aristotle completes Plato's Utopian project by constructing a hierarchy wherein representational mimesis of the tragic plot in the Poetics is central to a philosophical life, while mimesis as performative imitation of style in the Rhetoric is of marginal utility. In so doing, he counters Isocrates’ performative conception of speech education, according to which identification and performance both activate and sustain one's civic identity.

    doi:10.1080/02773940009391180

April 2000

  1. His Master's Voice: Tiro and the Rise of the Roman Secretarial Class
    Abstract

    The foundation for Rome's imperial bureaucracy was laid during the first century B.C., when functional and administrative writing played an increasingly dominant role in the Late Republic. During the First and Second Triumvirates, Roman society, once primarily oral, relied more and more on documentation to get its official business done. By the reign of Augustus, the orator had ceded power to the secretary, usually a slave trained as a scribe or librarian. This cultural and political transformation can be traced in the career of Marcus Tullius Tiro (94 B.C. to 4 A.D.), Cicero's confidant and amanuensis. A freedman credited with the invention of Latin shorthand (the notae Tironianae), Tiro transcribed and edited Cicero's speeches, composed, collected, and eventually published his voluminous correspondence, and organized and managed his archives and library. As his former master's fortune sank with the dying Republic, Tiro's began to rise. After Cicero's assassination, he became the orator's literary executor and biographer. His talents were always in demand under the new bureaucratic regime, and he prospered by producing popular grammars and secretarial manuals. He died a wealthy centenarian and a full Roman citizen.

    doi:10.2190/b4yd-5fp7-1w8d-v3uc

January 2000

  1. Burkean Invention in Technical Communication
    Abstract

    This article supplements existing rhetorical scholarship by returning to the notion of invention as general preparation of the communicator. Although much scholarship about invention in technical communication exists, it consists mainly of heuristics, checklists, ethical considerations, and audience awareness. Part of invention is using basic strategies to prepare the communicator to assess any communication situation and its context and to generate the appropriate discourse. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke's theories of dialectic and rhetoric are a twentieth-century version of this; this article explains important Burkean strategies such as etymological extension, limits of agreement with the thesis, finding the complex in the simple, expanding the circumference, translation or alembication, the four master tropes, and the pentad, and it shows how to apply these in technical communication. The article closes with a classroom assignment that uses Burkean invention strategies.

    doi:10.2190/krbk-6v0r-k4c3-38k5
  2. (RE)Constructing Arguments: Classical Rhetoric and Roman Engineering Reflected in Vitruvius' De Architectura
    Abstract

    Augustus is often described as the emperor who transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. When he returned victorious to Rome in BCE 29, Augustus embarked on a project to rebuild Rome with the splendor its new imperial status demanded. Despite the tranquility and prosperity enjoyed by most Romans during the Early Empire, many also felt a sense of loss. Much had changed in their social order at the end of the Republic. The nobility and the lower classes began to share more interests and Roman society took on a more egalitarian and commercial nature. Under Emperor Augustus, the function of rhetoric was stripped from legislative arenas and confined mainly to legal courts and ceremonial competitions. In the spirit of renewed patriotism and pragmatism, principles of rhetoric were also applied to writing about technical subjects, such as engineering and architecture. Both Vitruvius and Cicero used his writing to persuade Roman citizens to reclaim their heritage: of building arts in Vitruvius' case; of philosophy and meaningful public oratory in Cicero's case.

    doi:10.2190/ydb7-u3f7-9j45-bam9

2000

  1. The Fitness of Romance?: A Review of Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism by Camille K. Lewis

December 1999

  1. Review Essays: Sweetening Rhetorical Projects
    Abstract

    Susan Wells’ Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity is an often brilliant but at times frustrating book. It undertakes a project that has been suspended by those who want to re-validate rhetoric (and rhetoricians) within hermeneutics, especially by following the laborious normalizing work involved in Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational relocation of “truth” in the play of interpretative methods. Wells would herself suspend the competitive and entirely disciplinary contest between Aristotelian classical rhetoric (on her account, modernized by Brian Vickers and Jasper Neel, for instance) and hermeneutic rhetoricians who prefer reading the Phaedrus.

    doi:10.58680/ccc19991379

October 1999

  1. Confusion in the Classroom: Does Logos Mean Logic?
    Abstract

    The redefinition of logos as an appeal to logic is a mistaken association found all too often in the technical communication classroom. Logic inheres in all three proofs of persuasion; moreover, Aristotle used logos within the context of classical rhetoric to refer to the argument or speech itself. In this light, the proofs of persuasion represent the set of all logical means whereby the speaker can lead a “right-thinking” audience to infer something. If that something is an emotion, the appeal is to pathos; if it is about the character of the speaker, the appeal is to ethos; and if it is about the argument or speech itself, the appeal is to logos. This interpretation reinstates all three proofs of persuasion as legitimate, logical means to different proximate ends and provides a coherent definition of logos, consonant with Aristotle's Rhetoric, to the next generation of technical communicators.

    doi:10.2190/7aty-rvvu-53fj-mvc5
  2. Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory as a Framework for Teaching Scientific and Technical Communication
    Abstract

    Classical rhetorical theory has been used for relatively discrete, practice-oriented purposes in its application to teaching Scientific and Technical Communication. However effective these appropriations are, they isolate these resources from a comprehensive framework and from that framework's role in shaping disciplinary practice. Because these theoretical assets are integral to each student's preparation to be an effective, responsible practitioner, I have developed and taught an upper level rhetorical theory course for STC majors that is grounded in Aristotle's On Rhetoric and in his understanding that effective communication is a systematic tekhne/art.

    doi:10.2190/ltal-rv6y-t35p-jw4t
  3. Book Review: User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts
    doi:10.1177/105065199901300409

September 1999

  1. Kenneth Burke's “on ‘must’ and ‘take care'”;: An edition of his reply to Parkes's review of<i>Attitudes toward history</i>
    doi:10.1080/02773949909391159
  2. The uses and limits of rhetorical theory: Campbell, Whately, and Perelman and Olbrechts‐Tyteca on the earl of Spencer's “address to Diana”;
    Abstract

    r he three essays that follow offer readings of one of the most popular and l widely known rhetorical performances of recent times, the Earl of Spencer's 1997 funeral eulogy for his sister Diana, Princess of Wales (text reproduced in Appendix). Each section of the paper offers a reading of the address through a critical lens derived from the rhetorical theory of a different canonical theorist, respectively (and chronologically) George Campbell, Richard Whately, and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Three questions animate this project. The first concerns the relationship of theory to criticism. Neither Campbell, Whately, nor the Belgians discusses the role of rhetorical criticism or offers an apparatus that facilitates it, although each of their theories includes tenets applicable to criticism. How well do their theoretical tenets work at the level of criticism; do any of these theorists introduce concepts that analysis of rhetorical practice might challenge? The second question concerns influence. The three theorists we chose are particularly interesting from this perspective because all of them, to varying degrees, are selfconscious about their debts to the rhetorical tradition. Campbell cites and affirms the contributions of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, Whately incorporates Campbell, and the Belgians incorporate Whately incorporating Campbell. What is the nature of this influence? Are the differences among these theorists differences of perspective or of emphasis? We are aware of the complexities surrounding the question of influence since it was broached by T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, subsequently complicated by Harold Bloom, and more recently challenged by Michel Foucault. Our purpose is not to arbitrate these quite different views (which raise their own questions about the nature of influence) but to prompt a discussion of the nature of influence within the rhetorical tradition. The third question concerns the idea of progress in rhetorical theory. In what sense can each of the theorists be said to have made an advance over his predecessors? Does rhetorical theory progress as science typically progresses, by making obsolete that which it builds on? Or does rhetoric resemble philosophy, a discipline in which responses to a relatively constant problem set seem to benefit from their predecessors' work without replacing it?

    doi:10.1080/02773949909391161

May 1999

  1. A Rhetorical Stance on the Archives of Civic Action
    Abstract

    Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.

    doi:10.58680/ce19991139

January 1999

  1. Aristotle on epideictic: The formation of public morality
    Abstract

    (1999). Aristotle on epideictic: The formation of public morality. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 5-23.

    doi:10.1080/02773949909391135

November 1998

  1. Rhetoric as a Course of Study
    Abstract

    Examines the simultaneous rise of rhetorical theory and continued decline of rhetorical education. Presents and discusses three definitions of “rhetoric.” Argues for the historical prominence and continued relevance of the third definition: rhetoric as the study of speaking and writing well.

    doi:10.58680/ce19981112

October 1998

  1. The Role of Burke's Four Master Tropes in Scientific Expression
    Abstract

    The role of literary and rhetorical tropes in scientific discourse is frequently overlooked, largely because “rhetoric” and “science” seem to be incompatible modes of expression. However, if we look closely at scientific explanations—especially those designed to inform a general public—we find that they are as reliant on, if not more so, than more “subjective” forms of public discourse. In A Grammar of Motive, Kenneth Burke posits that all forms of discourse rely heavily on the “four master tropes” of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony to express ideas, and science is not an exception. This article outlines the processes behind the four master tropes and demonstrates instances where these tropes occur in the expression of scientific concepts found in such fields as biology, physics, and even mathematics. The purpose is to show that, contrary to what many members of the scientific (and lay) community suppose, rhetorical and literary tropes are necessary components to a linguistic understanding of complex scientific concepts; that such tropes do not hinder our understanding, but are in fact necessary to it.

    doi:10.2190/bm93-7y2g-bug4-bggy
  2. Exchanging Expertise: Learning from the Workplace and Educating it, Too
    Abstract

    Administrators and teachers for professional communication programs often are anxious to develop curricula that will teach “real world” practices of workplace practitioners. Many connections can and have been established in response to that concern. However, both practitioners and educators may mistakenly see such connections as a one-way exchange: practitioners with privileged knowledge sharing as a professional courtesy and with hopes of hiring graduates who may need less training on the job. However, the growth and sophistication of scholarship in professional communication, along with changes in the workplace that have led to more professional development needs among practitioners, have created new opportunities for two-way exchanges of expertise. Academics from professional communication programs now can and should use their programs' connections with the workplace to influence practices in the field. This article suggests ways to create more bi-directional educational exchanges.

    doi:10.2190/b61j-qxea-a8dc-2yj9

September 1998

  1. Rhetorical style and the formation of character: Ciceronian ethos in Thomas Wilson's<i>Arte of Rhetorique</i>
    Abstract

    (1998). Rhetorical style and the formation of character: Ciceronian ethos in Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 93-106.

    doi:10.1080/07350199809359233
  2. Writing the third‐sophistic Cyborg: Periphrasis on an [in]tense rhetoric
    Abstract

    (1998). Writing the third‐sophistic Cyborg: Periphrasis on an [in]tense rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 51-72.

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391130

July 1998

  1. Accommodating Science
    Abstract

    Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.

    doi:10.1177/0741088398015003006
  2. The Art of Rhetoric at the Amphiareion of Oropos
    Abstract

    Commentary: My intent in doing this project was to illustrate that an archaeological site as (apparently) obscure as the Amphiareion of Oropos holds a wealth of evidence about the nature and practice of rhetorical contests. Indirectly, I also hoped to illustrate that developing new methods of analysis through “field work” in classical rhetoric complements conventional arm-chair research - characteristic of literary analysis - as a source of primary evidence. The study opportunities and support that I received in 1974 and 1977 from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Greek Ministry of Science and Culture convinced me that the Amphiareion would be appropriate for study. The Amphiareion was small enough for an in-depth examination and large enough to be known by ancient geographers such as Pausanias. From 1977 to 1985 I analyzed the information I had gathered about the site: the inscriptions my wife, Jane Helppie, and I had photographed and drawn on our field trips, the commentary of ancient sources, and the results of archaeological excavations under Basil Petracos and the Greek Archaeological Service. This study reveals that rhetoric was practiced at locations other than prominent centers such as Athens and that these practices were sustained for centuries. In the future I plan to visit other larger and better known sites in order to continue the search for information that provides the basis for a richer understanding of the history of written communication in Greece.

    doi:10.1177/0741088398015003005

May 1998

  1. Constructing Multiple Subjectivities in Classroom Literacy Contexts
    Abstract

    Demonstrates ways in which three students in a multi-age, literature-based grade 3/4 classroom constructed and reconstructed their subjectivities based on demands of the social setting. Notes that each student’s participation was influenced by gender, social class, ethnicity, and the task. Suggests that interpretations of students’ interactions provide opportunities for developing a more sophisticated approach to multicultural education.

    doi:10.58680/rte19983903

March 1998

  1. The civic function of taste: A re‐assessment of Hugh Blair's rhetorical theory
    Abstract

    (1998). The civic function of taste: A re‐assessment of Hugh Blair's rhetorical theory. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 25-36.

    doi:10.1080/02773949809391117

January 1998

  1. Epideictic and Ethos in the Amarna Letters: The Witholding of Argument
    doi:10.1080/02773949809391113

October 1997

  1. Understandability of Narratives in Annual Reports
    Abstract

    This article shows problems in the communication process between preparers and users of financial reports. In Sweden as well as in other European countries, understandability of financial reports is a qualitative characteristic that is increasingly focused on. This is partly due to the growing significance of the stock market as a source for venture capital. Test techniques from linguistics and pedagogy have been used in accounting research to investigate the understandability of financial reports. The cloze technique is used in this study to investigate the understandability of messages in two Swedish annual reports related to small investors, and sophisticated preparers and users such as auditors and financial managers. The results show that important parts of the reports were not understood by small investors. The conclusion is that if small investors are continuingly to be considered as a target group for these financial reports, then there must be a large improvement of the text material. Otherwise the financial reports must be left to sophisticated users and interpreters.

    doi:10.2190/f7fc-hja6-w2p5-u2j3

September 1997

  1. An adaptation of aristotle: A note on the types of oratory
    doi:10.1080/07350199709389088
  2. Aristotle's<i>rhetoric,</i>dialogism, and contemporary research in composition
    Abstract

    This essay had its origin in my reaction to the claim, repeated in a number of essays by prominent scholars in composition, that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric was a dialogic one.' My response to such claims was and remains one of disbelief. As I examined the essays in which this view was advanced, I came to see that the evidence in support of it depended on related interpretations of Aristotle's concept of the enthymeme advanced by Lloyd Bitzer and John Gage. But in my view whether or not one accepts this controversial understanding of the enthymeme, it does not license a reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric as genuinely dialogic. As I reflected on what I now regarded as the immediate cause of a misinterpretation of Aristotle's Rhetoric (the misappropriation of a controversial interpretation of the enthymeme), I realized that this case had implications for how we, in rhetoric and composition, relate to and use our past. To establish my argument, I must show that important scholars in composition have claimed or implied that the theory Aristotle advances in the Rhetoric is dialogic, that this claim is obviously (not merely possibly) false, and that the evidence compositionists cite in support is derived not from the Rhetoric but depends on a misunderstanding of the implications of Bitzer' s and Gage's interpretations of the enthymeme. Then, having made this argument, I will trace what I regard as more general methodological implications of the misreading of the Rhetoric. Arguments that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric is dialogic have been advanced by Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede, John T. Gage, Gregory Clark, and Richard Leo Enos and Janice Lauer. In each case the claim is advanced in support of a more general effort to reconcile Aristotle' s theory with modem perspectives on rhetoric. The burden of Lunsford and Ede's thesis, as reflected in their title, On Distinctions between Classical and Modem Rhetoric, is to prove that Aristotelian rhetoric is closer in its theoretical assumptions to modern rhetoric than is generally thought. The view that Aristotle's theory is monologic is among the mistakes they address. They maintain that despite what we have thought in the past, Aristotle' s understanding of the rhetorical transaction is dialogic: Far from being 'one way,' 'manipulative' or 'monologic,' Aristotle' s [presentation of] rhetoric provides a complete description of the dynamic interaction between rhetor and audience, interaction mediated by language, the goal of which is not a narrow persuasion but an interactive means of discovering meaning through

    doi:10.1080/07350199709389079

July 1997

  1. <i>Sortilegio</i>: Cola Rienzi and the Blasphemy of Documentation
    Abstract

    Cola Rienzi, the 14th century notary and usurper who briefly resurrected the Roman Republic during the Avignon Papacy, is an important figure in the history of professional writing. The son of an unlettered country innkeeper, Cola combined a passion for classical rhetoric and literature with extensive training in legal documentation to create and sustain a messianic regime. By imitating Ancient Roman memos and reports in his written edicts, Cola convinced the people that he was their tribune and savior. The aristocrats and clerics chafing under Cola's authority, however, considered these documents sortilegio, sheer witchcraft. When Rienzi's edicts became increasingly self-serving and grandiloquent, the mob, sickened by his megalomania, tore him to pieces. Although he was posthumously declared anathema by the Church—partly for having invented the fountain pen—Cola's legislative reforms, and his revolutionary use of the classics to reshape administrative writing, helped pave the way for Renaissance Humanism.

    doi:10.2190/nxru-68rq-32p5-v1bc
  2. Teaching in Germany and the Rhetoric of Culture
    Abstract

    This article uses the cross-cultural concepts of context and time to examine the rhetoric of German university students in an English business writing course. This participant-observer account, which includes numerous student examples and observations, provides a fresh perspective for American teachers in increasingly multinational, multicultural classrooms. It also suggests how Aristotle's concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos together with the case method and group work can help teachers respond to the challenges in such classrooms. The article concludes by suggesting that understanding the rhetoric of culture is an important step in accepting and negotiating cultural differences.

    doi:10.1177/1050651997011003007
  3. Yin/Yang Principle and the Relevance of Externalism and Paralogic Rhetoric to Intercultural Communication
    Abstract

    Is understanding that transcends language and cultural barriers at all possible? How can we account for the different sorts of failure in achieving intercultural understanding and cooperation? What theory would describe how we can go beyond cross-cultural differences and reach some mutual agreement on business principles and practices? This article explores the relevance of Donald Davidson's philosophy of externalism and Thomas Kent's rhetorical theory of paralogic hermeneutics to these pressing issues in intercultural communication. Using a cultural perspective based on the Taoist yin/yang principle, it explains how an understanding of the externalist conception of truth and the world, and paralogic rhetoric as a theory of communicative interaction, can better enable us to deal with the radical changes taking place in the nature of intercultural relations and communication.

    doi:10.1177/1050651997011003004

May 1997

  1. Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America
    doi:10.2307/358678

January 1997

  1. Hobbes, Aristotle, and the materialist rhetor
    doi:10.1080/02773949709391088
  2. “It's essentially as though this were killing us”: Kenneth burke on mortification and pedagogy
    Abstract

    [A]ll. . . transcending of the thing by its name is toward death. And in this sense, even the most vital of language is intrinsically deathy. It is a realm of essence such that, without the warm blood of live bodies to feed it, it cannot truly exist. The spirit of all symbol systems could be said to transcend the body in this sense, taking on a dimension that can also be named by our good word for death: immortality. (Language as Symbolic Action 342)

    doi:10.1080/02773949709391085

November 1996

  1. The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric
    Abstract

    Preview this article: The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/58/7/collegeenglish9019-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce19969019

September 1996

  1. Plato's<i>protagoras</i>: Re visionary history as sophisticated comedy<sup>1</sup>
    doi:10.1080/07350199609359204
  2. Unfolding sophistic and humanist practice through<i>ingenium</i>
    Abstract

    If writers had at their fingertips a mechanism that would produce insight, that would contribute to their self-realization, and that would enable both them and their readers to step toward understanding, would they choose to use it?1 A strategy that discovers presence and penetrates the unknown is available to us as thinkers, as writers . . . ingenium, something old is new again. This essay deliberately refuses to give a simple definition of ingenium, for it cannot be defined in a few neat sentences. Instead, ingenium unfolds with recursive definitions. The first-ingenium, an innovative cognitive power, is a human way of knowing that includes the actual in a particular context and the extraordinary with the concrete. It combines sense perceptions with the imagination to open up and reveal the world. The second definition is from Grassi-the human capacity that enables words or senses or ideas to have adaptability, acumen, and 'instantaneousness' (Heidegger 20). The third layer is a cognitive activity that links a person perceptually with others and with the natural world. A person who uncovers a space for ingenium may generate new ways of inventing or interpreting discourse, problems, or ideas. This essay briefly traces aspects of ingenium as practiced by early Greek sophists and later by humanists. Next, ingenium is conceptualized as an inventional process that has four attributes: generating multiple ideas that may situate themselves in one's hand or ear or eye, opening the senses to the phenomenal world, finding the similar, and transferring meaning through fantasy. Through ingenium we may participate in a process that mirrors our complex world. Sophist and humanist practices touch and complement each other through ingenium. Ingenium as a discovery process subverts and surprises; it actively enriches the usual either-or model perpetuated by the Western objectivist tradition. Although sophists did not call the process ingenium, it was practiced in many ways as Gorgias's Encomium of Helen (c. 414 BCE) illustrates. Years later, humanist thinkers such as Vico, Gracian, and Vives promoted ingenium's philosophic importance as a means of enlarging the possibilities for communication. From the first sophists to contemporary thinkers, philosophers recognize the power of openness in language that breaks down boundaries of binary

    doi:10.1080/07350199609359207
  3. Toward a neosophistic writing pedagogy
    Abstract

    In her examination of Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, Patricia Bizzell announces her wish to find a solution to the problem of finding a compelling version of from which to speak on behalf of oppressed groups in spite of the climate of post-modern skepticism which attempts to render all value assertions nugatory (7-8).1 Bizzell understands the ultimate result of deconstruction-the tool that she and others in favor of a left-oriented political agenda have long used for the purpose of criticizing received wisdom and destabilizing traditional foundations of belief, teaching us to regard all foundationalist assumptions with suspicion (14)-to be Pyrrhonian skepticism, a nihilistic abyss of skepticism that refuses to regard even temporary truths. Pyrrhonian skepticism has forced Deconstruction to turn on the very scholars who have employed it to undermine foundationalist beliefs by always already undermining the left-oriented actions those scholars now wish to take. In the past, Bizzell has effectively critiqued foundationalist assumptions (e.g., Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Composition Studies), but now she says she is ready even to play the fool if she must to pursue ways to engage in processes whereby we use our common capacities to make reasonable judgments about experience in light of egalitarian values so that we may move more decisively toward democratic political (16). Since Bizzell is willing to play the fool for her pursuit, she might make an appeal to an older group of thinkers who have been misrepresented as fools more than once: the early Greek sophists, whom I believe offer a theoretical base to Bizzell and all of us who are interested in professing left-oriented values in our writing classrooms. To explicate that sophistic theoretical base, I will briefly review recent work on the sophists in composition and rhetoric, illustrate how a sophistic understanding of the progress of knowledge can enable us to avoid the trap of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and examine three neosophistic essays that organize the principles of neosophism. In the final section, I will use sample assignments I've designed for my own composition course to demonstrate how a neosophistic pedagogy authorizes sociopolitical action in the composition classroom. Bizzell, to her credit, connects her search for rhetorical authority to the work of the sophists. Playing the fool, she says, allows one to innocently transgress social boundaries, an action that in turn, she hopes, allows teachers

    doi:10.1080/07350199609359208

July 1996

  1. Teaching Technical Writing with Only Academic Experience
    Abstract

    Can technical writing still be taught credibly by teachers with only academic experience? This article draws a distinction between courses designed for students expecting to be full-time technical communicators and general-purpose service courses designed for students in a variety of fields. The article then argues that teachers of service courses can teach credibly without having worked as writers in nonacademic workplaces if they fulfill these conditions: they should have a critical command of research into nonacademic writing, rhetorical theory, and reading theory; they should define technical writing broadly enough to see themselves as technical writers; they should seek and take advantage of everyday opportunities to practice technical writing and reading; and they should carefully consider the sense in which their courses reflect reality.

    doi:10.2190/aa5p-ca40-gv64-qpht
  2. Victor W. Pagé's Early Twentieth-Century Automotive and Aviation Books
    Abstract

    Victor W. Pagé was either the first or one of the first to make a living primarily as a technical communicator in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. His 33 automotive and aviation books published by the Norman W. Henley Company were popular with both the public and critics because they contained timely, comprehensive coverage of novel technology; profuse illustrations; occasional analogies; easy-to-access information; well-established expertise; and sophisticated employment of task orientation. Pagé was able to publish many books quickly because he reused manufacturers' and his own material and methods of organization. He was also able to communicate his novel information effectively because he had both extensive firsthand experience with early automobiles and planes and because he was continually involved in teaching. Victor Pagé's early twentieth-century work demonstrates both what have become mainstream techniques in technical communication and a number of unique rhetorical strategies.

    doi:10.1177/1050651996010003001
  3. Do Adults Change their Minds after Reading Persuasive Text?
    Abstract

    To change the mind of a reader, authors compose written persuasion according to a set of rhetorical features. This article describes the features of persuasive texts and reviews research results to explore whether adults indeed change their minds after reading persuasion. Toulmin's (1958) model of argument and Aristotle's model of persuasive content characterize the structure and content of well-written persuasion. Research in social psychology and text comprehension shows that adults typically build a case for their own prereading belief rather than process a persuasive text mindfully, weigh evidence, and change their beliefs. An important contract between author and reader is typically broken. Research on designing text to disabuse students of scientific misconceptions points to text features that authors could use to encourage readers to read persuasion mindfully.

    doi:10.1177/0741088396013003001

May 1996

  1. Aristotle's Voice, Our Ears
    doi:10.2307/358799
  2. Review: Aristotle’s Voice, Our Ears
    Abstract

    Power, Genre, and Technology Deborah H. Holdstein This Is Not an Essay Carolyn R. Miller Notes on Postmodern Double Agency and the Arts of Lurking James J. Sosnoski

    doi:10.58680/ccc19968704

April 1996

  1. Effective Litigative Writing
    Abstract

    This review of the relationship of law and art in the litigative context explores ways in which the methodologies of the novelist and other artists can be invoked by the lawyer in structuring and developing a case and presenting it to a court. To the litigators who transcend the form books and stereotypes and see their cases with a fresh eye, neither the law nor the facts are fixed in stone but rather created to meet the deepest realities of the case within the context of our most fundamental values and beliefs. Litigators, by the way they define and project the issues, can affect, even determine, what law and facts are legally relevant and dispositive. They must devise and write the story that threads the client's way out of the labyrinth. Mastery of the formal requirements of litigative writing is only a necessary first step. Freewriting; Hemingwayesque choice of words and syntax; harnessing the symbolic, often hidden, power of language; achieving the dramatic potential of case presentation—all these and more from the creative artist's repertoire empower litigators to win their cases. Resort is made not only to the applicable statutory, regulatory, and case law but also to the processes of the like of Cezanne, Conrad, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, Aristotle, and Faulkner.

    doi:10.1177/1050651996010002002

March 1996

  1. Edward Schiappa's reading of the sophists<sup>1</sup>
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank Kathleen Welch and Richard Leo Enos, RR peer revieweis for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

    doi:10.1080/07350199609389064
  2. Some of my best friends are neosophists: A response to Scott Consigny
    Abstract

    has misunderstood me, I shall maintain, and the misunderstanding matters for our collective understanding of antifoundationalism and the genre of writing known as history. In this reply I begin with claims that are intended to challenge SC's reading of my work: First, I am an antifoundationalist. Second, I do not oppose neosophistic scholarship. Third, SC's reading of my work is overly reductionist. Then, in conclusion, I want to suggest that SC's account of antifoundationalism is problematic and that a more pragmatic version of antifoundationalism would be more consistent with SC's presuppositions and politically more useful.1 I do not understand why SC believes I am a foundationalist, since I have identified repeatedly my theoretical preferences for antifoundationalist social constructionism. SC simply proclaims, ex cathedra, that Poulakos, Crowley, Vitanza, Welch, and Jarratt are antifoundationalists, and Havelock, Kerferd, de Romilly, Cole, and I are foundationalists. Though I would be honored to be counted as part of either group, I do not understand why I am in the group that is supposed to move to the back of the bus. Why are these scholars (all of whom have published in classics journals) to be branded foundationalist? Just because they do history and work with original Greek texts? And, even if these scholars are (gasp!) foundationalists, precisely how does that make their work any less valuable?

    doi:10.1080/07350199609389065
  3. What if Aristotle took sophists seriously? New readings in Aristotle's<i>rhetoric</i>
    Abstract

    New research into the pre-Socratic arts of discourse (technai log6n) has not only enriched our understanding but also increased our respect for the work that the great pre-Socratic thinkers did.1 In this paper I want to encourage a rereading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle with the results of this research in mind. If scholars would accept that Plato and Aristotle, at least some of the time, reflected an understanding and respect for the work of the sophists and rhetors similar to the one now emerging, the result might well be a new, fruitful, and richer reading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle. I believe that as a result, both Plato and Aristotle would emerge as more rhetorical and nuanced than they have been previously thought to be. This seems a strange expectation. First, it is well known that Aristotle, for example, seldom seems to allude to particular individuals who were sophists with anything but scorn. Certainly, when he uses the word sophist as a general term, it is used in a pejorative sense for the besetting vices of philosophy and philosophers: self-promotion through speech and victory at any cost in speech. Such usage is itself a reflection on those who claim the name as a serious description of their work.

    doi:10.1080/07350199609389063
  4. <i>Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing in America</i>by Jasper Neel
    Abstract

    Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing in America by Jasper Neel. Southern Illinois U P: Carbondale, 1994. 225 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773949609391067
  5. Kenneth Burke among the moderns:<i>Counter‐statement</i>as counter statement
    Abstract

    It is no overstatement to claim that Kenneth Burke was weaned on modernism, that indeed he was a pivotal figure among the remarkable moderns who gathered in Greenwich Village in the years just before and after World War I. Yet the observation bears repeating nonetheless. Born in 1897 in Pittsburgh and educated there through high school, Burke moved with his parents in 1915 to an apartment in Weehawken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from 42nd Street in New York City. Though he studied at Ohio State during the spring semester of 1916 (with his thoroughly modernist friend James Light) and though he commuted from Weehawken to Columbia University throughout 1917, Burke gradually determined to take his instruction from Greenwich Village rather than from the university; having insinuated himself into the literary and intellectual scene, he moved to Greenwich Village early in 1918. There he met, associated with, befriended, and/or worked with a host of Village writers, artists, and critics, including (to mention only the ones that seem most prominent today) William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Jean Toomer, and Katherine Anne Porter. Burke was on hand for the most experimental and successful period of the Provincetown Players, and he followed political and artistic developments in The Masses. While spending much of his time after 1922 writing, reading, editing, and translating at his Andover, New Jersey farm, Burke remained very much a physical and verbal presence in the Greenwich Village modernist scene, contributing poetry, fiction, criticism, and translations to modernist magazines. As an editorial assistant at The Dial, the most prominent such magazine of the era, he provided editorial services on behalf of Williams, Crane, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Schnitzler, and Wallace Stevens. And he maintained his social and artis

    doi:10.1080/02773949609391064
  6. Vico and Kenneth Burke
    doi:10.1080/02773949609391063