Alan G. Gross's The Scientific Sublime1 is nothing if not respectful—of both his subject and his audience. Those looking for pyrotechnics will be disappointed by Gross's sometimes deferential treatment of the various uses and examples of the sublime in contemporary popular science. Readers finish the book with a foundation not only in the scientific sublime but also in the contributions, controversies, and patterns of reasoning of ten of the world's most well-known public scientists from the latter half of the twentieth century. Patient with his material and his reader's potential ignorance of the popularizing scientific discourse, Gross traces how the scientific sublime animates, galvanizes, and explains the work, the rhetorical choices, and the ideal audience of the theoretical physicists, cosmologists, and evolutionary biologists,The balanced organization of the book suggests Gross's measured exploration of the topic: there are analyses of five physicists and five biologists, an introductory chapter on the nature and history of the sublime, and a closing chapter on the interplay of religion, science, and the sublime. Moreover, the thirteen chapters (two are devoted to Steven Jay Gould) are almost all about twenty pages and can largely be read independently of each other. Even without delving into Gross's prose, there is a deliberateness about the construction of the book, an orderliness that seems to eschew too much nervy straying into grey speculations. Indeed, if you are looking for a book that is muscular with theoretical arcana or that strides into speculative meditations, you may feel shortchanged. Gross is careful of his readers’ sensibilities, comprehension, and incredulity. His diction never falls into jargon, despite two subject matters—the sublime and the scientific—that might tempt him, and his arguments are methodically presented, even if he occasionally indulges in whimsical explanations not necessarily germane to his immediate argument. You never feel lost when you're reading The Scientific Sublime; you always feel that you understand what you have read; and you never get the feeling that Gross is forcing the last word on the subject, though you may conclude there certainly is more to say.Beyond giving a layout for the book, chapter one sets up its thesis and guiding principle, one that is only lightly touched upon throughout the analytic chapters but that nonetheless is key to getting the most out of Gross's explorations. Rather than look for ruptures in the form or manner of the popularizers’ works that reveal their commitment to a scientific sublime, Gross is interested in “the sublimity that inheres in their structure, a spirit that informs their every aspect”—a motivation that leads him to survey the argumentation, structure, diction, and images of their works as this principle animates the popularizers’ promotion of science.2 The scientific sublime is essentially a type of wonder in both the scientist and reader, born from the amazement of a novel phenomenon and the astonishment at the hidden pattern in nature shown and then explained by science in its “vast communal epic . . . on a theme of origins.”3 It is this awe and astonishment that Gross deems the scientific sublime, a phrase he justifies in the first chapter by giving his readers a quick tour of the concept of the sublime in Western thought, ending with Adam Smith and C.P. Snow's glossing of the scientific sublime.In Part One of his book, Gross tackles the writings of five popularizing physicists. The first analysis spotlights Richard Feynman, whose work represents the subgenre of the “Consensual Sublime.” Gross explores Feynman's self-construction of the “scientist as raconteur” who delights in the practical puzzles suggested and solved by theoretical physicists.4 His second focuses on Steven Weinberg, who exemplifies the “Conjectural Sublime,” enticing us to follow his narrative in order to understand how the physicist explains to those less schooled in mathematics the very beginning of the universe while gracefully unifying others’ theories. Physicist Lisa Randall's writings represent the “Technological Sublime,” which we feel when confronted with exalted machinery like the Hoover Dam. Through imagery and analogies, Randall's prose leads the reader through abstruse theoretical physics, “a speculative sublime that depends for validation” on equipment like the Large Hadron Collider or the GAIA satellite, the supreme manifestations of the technological sublime.5 The penultimate chapter on the physicists considers string-theory pioneer Brian Green, who converts esoteric math into the physical and the visual with analogies that surround us with the familiar as he leads us into his sometimes far-fetched explanations. Gross rightly points out that Green's sublimity is not the result of “the wonder at the revelation not of how the universe works, but how it may possibly work.”6 As is fitting his stature as the most-widely known popularizer of physicists in our time, Stephen Hawkins rounds out Gross's analyses in Part One. In perhaps his most successful chapter, capturing many aspects of Hawkins's rhetoric, Gross argues that Hawkins represents the “Sublime Embodied,” the impression we are interacting with “a myth of genius and indomitable will, a man who has handicapped his handicap.”7 In reading the oracular Hawkins, we not only learn about science and its significance, we experience it through Hawkins, whose playful humor and mental dexterity highlights his own astonishment at the scientific sublime.Gross begins Part Two, on the sublime biologists, with another of his most successful chapters—on Rachel Carson and the “Ethical Sublime.” Showing the development of Carson as a writer and rhetor, “a progress from the love of nature to its defense, from environmental rhapsody to environmental ethics,” Gross not only summarizes the development of Carson's ethical position but also the stylistic techniques that grow from and inform her more mature appreciation of nature.8 Chapters eight, “The Balanced Sublime,” and nine, “Experiencing the Sublime,” cover Steven Jay Goud's books and his essays, respectively. In Gould's books, Gross argues, the biologist portrays a scientific sublime correctly conjured if an equipoise is found between two competing ideas so that our awe of nature has all its requisite complexity. In the survey of his essays in chapter nine, Gross finds that Gould plays the scientific cicerone who cultivates his readers’ curiosity then toys with it through meanderings, frustrations, and, ultimately, discoveries in a manner that parallels the scientific process, explaining nature, its patterns, and its laws. Steven Pinker's “Polymath Sublime” occupies Gross's tenth chapter. Gross argues that all of Pinker's works, when they don't fall into an authoritarian voice, captivate because of the evocation of a sublime that highlights not only the patterns of nature but how science can explain so many subjects beyond those studied in the lab. In chapter eleven, Gross tackles the “Mathematical Sublime” of Richard Dawkins, his rousing persona and the intellectual treasure hunt he brings you by means of his devotion to and knowledge of mathematics, despite the obvious problems of his evolutionary theory. The analyses are rounded out with a discussion of E.O Wilson's “Biophilic Sublime,” which explores the richness and limitations of his sociobiology, infused with his sublimic “love for all living things,” their diversity, and their preservation.9Considering the contemporary popularizers of science in the aggregate, Gross concludes his book with perhaps his most challenging claim, that scientists may be overly hasty in dismissing religion (and philosophy) as irrelevant to the task of understanding the natural world, a “haste galvanized by the populace's recalcitrant faith in a God of origins, the same faith that encourages them to believe that God is a delusion—a very unscientific manner of thinking.10 Gross essentially ends his book with a quiet call to the character trait that indeed he portrays throughout the book and what, incidentally, was a defining characteristic of early nineteenth-century natural philosophers—humility.But if Gross's persona in The Scientific Sublime seems to counterbalance the large egos of the popularizers, in many ways his work parallels their attitude to the natural world they study: he carefully and excitedly explicates those moments of awe in the popularizers’ explanations of the wonders of the world and their studies. Gross does for them what they do for nature and science. Yet, the modesty of Gross's claims may leave some readers asking for a bit more derring-do in the conclusions about what the scientific sublime actually is and what it does, especially after having followed him through his relatively separate analyses of the ten scientists in his book. For example, Gross well-documents those moments the scientists manifest (or even embody) astonishment or wonder from various aspects of science, but does that amazement actually rise to the level of the sublime? Does the scientific sublime require the terror typically associated with the sublime—if not, why not? What are some of the cultural or political consequences of utilizing the sublime when popularizing science? And finally, some readers might also desire grander and more thematic claims about how the feelings of the sublime are generated in general audiences and not simply those who are predisposed to find wonder in science.Like those whom he studies, Gross seems to write with a keen sense that scholars and readers should build off of each other rather than search after an Archimedean eureka. His is a book of exploratory essays. The Scientific Sublime plots not only those areas where the scientist or audience sense awe and astonishment but also those areas that are rich for future interrogations and investigations about the intersection of science, the public, and the sublime.

Book Review| March 01 2014 Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion. By Jeanne Fahnestock. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; pp. 464. $99.00 cloth; $39.95 paper. Andrew C. Hansen Andrew C. Hansen Trinity University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (1): 189–193. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.1.0189 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew C. Hansen; Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2014; 17 (1): 189–193. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.1.0189 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. © 2014 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| March 01 2010 Before the Rhetorical Presidency Before the Rhetorical Presidency. Martin J. Medhurst. Andrew C. Hansen Andrew C. Hansen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (1): 149–151. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955595 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew C. Hansen; Before the Rhetorical Presidency. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2010; 13 (1): 149–151. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41955595 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. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This early letter plainly embodies Burke's conflicting views about the constituents of the aesthetic experience. Is the delight of literature a hysteric result of the work's overlap with an audience's ideology-the nodus of beliefs and judgments in a work? Or is the pleasure the result of a technical response to the formal qualities of art? The answer in the letter to Cowley suggests that the enjoyment is an unproblematic result of both the ideological and the technical, the rhetorical and the formal. But the incipient contradiction contained even in this early and tentative resolution seems to haunt Burke throughout his career, most clearly ghosted in his first book of criticism, Counter-Statement.1 To announce that this wrinkle can be found in many of the pages of Counter-Statement probably trespasses on the platitudinous. From the earliest reviews of the book, such as that of Granville Hicks in the 2 December 1931 issue of The New Republic, to its most contemporary explication, such as Jack Selzer's article in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, the unsettling tension . . . between the aesthetic and the social is given place and sometimes even described as the animating principle of the book (Selzer 37). As Selzer notes, most of the major critics of Granville Hicks, Isidor Schneider, Robert Penn Warren, Armin Paul Frank, Paul Jay, Grieg E. Henderson, William H. Rueckert, and Frank Lentricchia, and even Burke himself note the internally-contradictory character of Counter-Statement, each with his own manner of reconciling, laying bare, or judging the discordant timber (45-46). What is absent in the criti-