Lawrence J. Prelli, University of New Hampshire Floyd D. Anderson, State University of New York at Brockport Abstract In this essay, we survey the diverse historical uses and functions of the circumstantial terms during more than three millennia of western thought and culture. In so doing, we reveal the originality and innovativeness of Kenneth Burke’s use of the terms. Our survey also provides support for Burke’s contention that the terms are “transcendental” because they represent “the basic forms of thought.” Introduction and Preview “All arguments fall into two classes, those concerned with things and those concerned with persons. . . . [Of things], actions are the most nearly connected with persons. . . . In regard to every action the question arises Why or Where or When or How or By what means the action is performed.” Readers might attribute these remarks to Kenneth Burke elaborating his dramatistic pentad/hexad: act, scene, agent, agency, purpose, and attitude. That attribution, however, would be wrong. First-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian wrote those words when discussing what he called the “accidents” (or “circumstances”) of persons and of things ( Institutio oratoria 5.10.23, 32). Commonly referred to as “circumstantial terms” or the peristaseis , the terms have a long and varied history extending from preliterate Greece to the twenty-first century. Kenneth Burke has observed that “the resources of symbolism have always been the same” (“Counter-Gridlock” 370). The circumstantial terms, as we will show, are among the ubiquitous symbolic resources that have served diverse functions throughout historical times, places, cultures, occasions, agents, and usages. This essay surveys the myriad historical usages and functions of the circumstantial terms in western thought and culture. They have been used to invent, interpret, analyze, recollect, evaluate, explain, and attribute human motivations from the days of oral antiquity down to the present. This…

In this essay, we survey the diverse historical uses and functions of the circumstantial terms during more than three millennia of western thought and culture. In so doing, we reveal the originality and innovativeness of Kenneth Burke’s use of the terms. Our survey also provides support for Burke’s contention that the terms are “transcendental” because they represent “the basic forms of thought.”

Scholarship concerning visual representations in science, technology, and medicine is in a preliminary phase. This essay surveys selected areas where visually-oriented rhetorical studies of science, technology and medicine are emerging. It examines the relationships between visual and verbal dimensions of scientific, technical, and medical texts; raises questions concerning the appropriateness of using concepts from the linguistic tradition to analyze visuals; and outlines fruitful areas for further study, ranging from studies of the truth-value of images through public communication about visualizations.

This paper recommends three general lines of inquiry concerning rhetorical invention as alternative ways to advance work in rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine. One line of inquiry involves the study of the creative processes and imaginative practices involved in the invention of perspectives in discourses of and about science, technology, and medicine. This line of inquiry is elaborated with attention to the master tropes, dramatism, argument, and visual representations. The second general line of inquiry involves identification, analysis, and critique of the commonplaces that are deployed as authoritative in discourses about purportedly “expert” matters. The third line of inquiry concerns articulation of the distinctive place of a rhetorical perspective, informed by an emphasis on invention, in cross-disciplinary projects involving science, technology and medicine.

This essay discloses distinctive but overlapping realist, communicative, and critical dimensions of Burke's concept of recalcitrance. Previous scholarly uses of the concept have tended to yield only partial understandings of one or another of these three distinctive dimensions. Moreover, that previous work overlooked some of Burke's pivotal and revealing writings on the term when elaborating its meaning, including his designation of the term's application to factors that substantiate, incite, and correct statements. This essay offers the term's first comprehensive account that integrates overlooked writings and yields its full range of conceptual dimensions and applications as Burke had envisioned them.