This symposium centers on the recently released Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project. In addition to the document itself, the symposium features an introduction to it by some of its drafters, as well as responses to it by veteran composition specialists.

4QMMT is one of only a few epistles among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It represents the Qumran community's effort to correct impure priestly practice in the Jerusalem Temple, so that when God descends in final judgment at the end of days, his Temple will not be defiled and Israelites will rejoice in their atonement rather than suffer for their wickedness. The authors of 4QMMT create identification by citing scriptural laws that would be commonly agreed upon. Yet they also create distinction by criticizing the Temple priests' incorrect interpretations of more ambiguous laws.

Reviews Scott Consigny, Gorgias: Sophist and Artist (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). 296pp. Why the Sophists? Why Gorgias? Why now? W. K. C. Guthrie points to a rupture in the history of sophistic studies that leads to some preliminary answers: "It is true that the powerful impetus of this movement [i.e., the revival of sophistry since the 1930s] was given by the rise of totalitarian gov­ ernments in Europe and the second world war, and it was indeed disturbing to learn that the aim of the German Nazi Party, as described in its official programme, was the production of 'guardians in the highest Platonic sense'" (The Sophists, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 10). Among classicists, historians, and philosophers, the interest in sophistic studies that emerged out of this historical rupture was defined by a negative impulse: If Plato's ideas support immoral ideologies, then we must turn instead to the ideas of his most bitter rivals, the Sophists. Yet the revival of sophistry specifically within rhetorical studies took on a different character. Instead of being defined by a negative impulse, studies of sophistic rhetoric were defined by the positive search for affinities between ancient and modern theories of persuasion. Robert Scott and Michael Leff, for example, found precedents for epistemic rhetoric among the sophistic fragments, and John Poulakos invoked sophistic notions of propriety and the opportune moment in his universal definition of rhetoric. Scott Consigny's Gorgias: Sophist and Artist represents a new phase in studies of sophistic rhetoric. In this complex and well-written book, Consigny avoids making problematic generalizations about "the Sophists," who were, in reality, a thoroughly disparate group of traveling teachers; he does not rely excessively on Plato's dialogues as source materials for Gorgias's art of rhetoric; and he resists the neosophistic impulse to appropriate ancient doctrines for modern purposes. In his introduction, Consigny discusses prior scholarship on the Sophists and the method of historiography that informs his analysis. Here Consigny contends that the fragmentary nature of Gorgias's texts, their questionable authenticity, and the ambiguous language in which Gorgias wrote create a "hermeneutic aporia," an interpretive impasse. Some "objectivist" scholars attempt to escape this aporia by suggesting that there is a single, correct interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric, and it is the function of historical schol­ arship to discover it. Other "rhapsodic" scholars argue that the meaning© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XX, Number 3 (Summer 2002). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 299 300 RHETORICA Gorgias intended in his writings is now lost forever, and they use subjective interpretations of Gorgianic rhetoric to construct neosophistic theories that have modern relevance. Consigny, on the other hand, draws from Stanley Fish's notion of interpretive communities, arguing that pure truth is inacces­ sible and pure subjectivity is insufficient. Scholarly conventions established in academic discourse communities should guide our interpretations of Gor­ gianic rhetoric. While much prior scholarship identifies Gorgias as either a subjectivist or an empiricist, Consigny favors a newly emerging third school of criticism that identifies Gorgias as an antifoundationalist. Consigny begins his antifoundationalist reading of Gorgianic rhetoric with an interpretation of On Not-Being as an attack against both philosophical truth and empirical realism. In other texts (Epitaphios, Helen, and Palamedes), Gorgias articulates a more positive antifoundationalist theory of language based on the ancient notion of the contest or agon. Here language is defined by context, by the play of interaction among participants in a linguistic game that is governed by communal rules, and words derive meaning from their role in this interaction. Within such a framework, foundational truth is impossible since each context brings with it a different set of constraints, and radical subjectivity is also impossible since these very same constraints prevent chaos. Next Consigny argues that Gorgias articulates a nascent social con­ structionist view of knowledge in which established social conventions (or "tropes") condition individuals to act in communally authorized ways. Yet Gorgias is not in favor of a micro-social theory of conventions that separate communities by focusing on their foundational...

Review of the following books: (1) Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition by Russel K. Durst, (2) Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald, and (3) Teaching Composition as a Social Process by Bruce McComiskey.

Presents brief guidelines for developing writing assignments based on the author’s description (a politicized representation) of postmodern cultural studies. Discusses a composition assignment in which students critique the formal and the hidden curriculum of a class they have taken in the recent past, and in which they also become writing members of the institutions and communities they critique.

T hroughout this essay, I argue that the three primary extant fragments of Gorgias of Leontini-On Non-Existence (or On Nature), the Encomium of Helen, and the Defense of Palamedes-are not disparate or contradictory statements, as is often assumed, but intricately interrelated and internally consistent contributions to a complex theory and art (techne') of rhetoric. Of course, we cannot argue that Gorgias composed these texts with a holistic rhetorical task in mind; however, reconstructing and interpreting On Non-Existence, the Helen, and the Palamedes holistically does shed significant new light on our current understanding of Gorgias' emerging theory and techne' of rhetoric. In brief, On Non-Existence describes the effects that externally given realities (ta onta) have on the human psyche (psuche), the Helen explores the unethical workings of the persuasive arts on the human psuche, and the Palamedes demonstrates rhetorical topoi for the invention of arguments designed to move the human psuche' of a forensic audience to ethical action. Reconstructed thus as a holistic statement, Gorgias' primary extant fragments theorize the social nature of linguistic symbols and explore their artistic uses for both unethical and ethical purposes; and as a holistic interpretation of the extant fragments demonstrates, Gorgias favors the topical invention of ethical arguments over the magical invention of false arguments, unsupported opinions, and deliberate deceptions. Criticism of Gorgianic rhetoric as inartistic is almost as ancient as the very texts themselves. Plato, who probably wrote some of his earliest dialogues while Gorgias was still living and teaching in Athens, argues that Gorgianic rhetoric is not a techne. In the Gorgias, for example, Plato (through the mouthpiece of Socrates) tells the character Gorgias that his conception and practice of rhetoric whose scope is logos is not a true art but merely a false art, a form of flattery because its goal is to elicit pleasure and not to discover the Good. Moreover, in the Phaedrus Plato explains that sophistic rhetoric is irrational and thus atechnical because it is not founded on truth discovered through the principles of philosophical dialectic. No activity, according to Plato, is artistic unless it begins with a foundation of pure universal knowledge discovered through dialectical inquiry, and it is precisely because those who claim to teach and practice the art of rhetoric are ignorant of dialectic that they incapable of properly defining rhetoric, and that in turn leads them to imagine that by possessing themselves of the requisite antecedent learning they have discovered the art itself' (269b). But if we accept Plato's philosophy/rhetoric demarcation along with the claim that all

Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer Subjects according modernist identity/difference binary oppositions that are politically problematic.1 The modernist Subject is defined in terms of its objective relationship reality and its opposition Other subjects, and the construction of the modernist Subject (autonomous and sovereign) is an effect of ethno-centric formulations (frames, constructions) of identity/difference oppositions.2 In Orientalism, for example, Edward Said describes how modernist European societies construct cultural differences not only as but also as opposite (the of the West is constructed in opposition the of the East). According Said, When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research, public policy, . . . the result is usually polarize the distinction-the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western-and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies. The tendency, then, is to channel thought into a West or an East compartment (46), eliminating the possibility for common ground, agreement, understanding, or in more extreme cases, destroying the human capacity for tolerance of We cannot maintain oppositional notions of identity/difference without inevitably falling into a situation in which gains (or attempts gain) hegemonic control over difference. A few recent cultural theorists, on the other hand, do not view and as oppositional terms; instead, they construct identity and difference as a complementary pair, as an alliance rather than an opposition. And the subjectivities that result from this alliance refuse the structural closure of the modernist Subject and articulate themselves (engage in cultural and rhetorical practices) in the aporia between and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in particular deconstruct the unified structure of the sovereign and autonomous modernist Subject, positing in its place a space in the aporia between and where subjectivities construct themselves and each other. Throughout much of his work, Foucault is concerned with issues of and in the textual construction of subjectivities. Discursive

(1994). Neo‐sophistic rhetorical theory: Sophistic precedents for contemporary epistemic rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 24, No. 3-4, pp. 16-24.

(1992). Disassembling Plato's critique of rhetoric in the Gorgias (447a‐466a) Rhetoric Review: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 205-216.