Interests and Opportunities appears at a critical moment in university writing instruction, a moment when many colleges and universities are relegating the task of basic writing instruction to two-...

This essay argues that strong versions of rhetoric share with weak versions of rhetoric an aversion to vulnerability. Claiming that the shared aversion to vulnerability hinders a fuller articulation of a strong version of rhetoric, the essay goes on to argue for redefining vulnerability as a characteristic that enlarges rhetorical thinking. Vulnerability is described not as a weakness but as a strength, an attitude of care and concern that connects us to the world and to each other. The essay is written as a meditation and is meant to encourage the reader's active engagement with the argument.

Recent appeal to the concept of design in composition studies benefits teaching writing in digital media. Yet the concept of design has not been developed enough to fully benefit composition instruction. This article develops an understanding of design as a matter of resolving wicked problems and makes a case for the advantages of this understanding in composition studies.

I have been looking forward to the publication of City of Rhetoric since I first heard David Fleming present his research on the rhetoric of gentrification several years ago. My anticipation was a ...

Who Says? is a collection of essays that ranges widely over rhetorics of work and the working class. In his introduction the editor of the collection, William DeGenaro, points out the lack of atten...

The vandalizing of Monument to Joe Louis initiated efforts in the media to explain both the meaning of the vandalism and of the monument itself. This article engages those efforts to find an explanation linking act to object. Proceeding through the joining of acts, objects, and words, this article works toward a non-reductive account of the embodiment of rhetoric.

This article explores the intersections of rhetoric and space in the city of Cape Town, South Africa, by locating the spatial persistence and rhetorical resonance of two distinctly different commemorative plaques. Discussion of these plaques illuminates the rhetorical challenges of post-apartheid cities. Discussion of the two plaques also illustrates the rhetorical capacity of ubuntu, a concept used by current South African leaders to move beyond the injuries of apartheid.

Abstract Drawing on the concept of rhetorical space, as described by Roxanne Mountford, this essay gives an account of Robben Island. A notorious South African prison, Robben Island was home to the majority of the apartheid government's high‐profile political prisoners. After the transition to a democratic government in South Africa, the prison became a national heritage site. Documenting representative accounts of the space of Robben Island during and after apartheid, this essay elaborates the concept of rhetorical space, demonstrating the complex and dynamic interactions of spatial experience and rhetorical authority. In particular, the example of Robbern Island illustrates the ways in which space functions as a maleable rhetorical resource.

The fiftieth anniversary issue of CCC included a call from Geneva Smitherman for compositionists to renew the fight for language rights. In this article, we take up Smitherman’s call by situating the theory of language rights in composition studies in a brief history of rights rhetoric in the United States.

I argue that our responses to the Oakland ebonics resolution miss what made the resolution so significant while also making debate about it so intractable. I propose that compositionists who acknowledge attitudes that made the resolution so significant can productively engage the larger public regarding literacy education in a racially divided democracy.

From its origins in ancient Greece, Western rhetoric has been embodied in city life. Save for his walk with Phaedrus, Plato's Socrates only practiced his dialectical rhetoric within the walls of Athens and then only for the ennoblement of the republic. So in the Apology, Socrates defends one version of life in the city against another, explaining that in his talk with others, he had been trying to persuade each of you not to have a greater concern for anything you have than for yourselves, that each of you may be the best and wisest person possible, nor to consider the affairs of the city in preference to the well-being of the city itself' (36c5-9; trans. in Kennedy 44). For Plato the one best hope for Athens was embodied in cultivating the character of its citizens. Cultivation of self and the well-being of the city were so closely linked, a link so prominent in classical rhetoric, that Cicero could monumentalize rhetoric's civic dimensions through the figure of the orator's open hand: a gesture of conciliation and cooperation, of civic responsibility and democratic possibility. The open hand of the Ciceronian orator still has hold of imaginations, embodying hopes of communitarianism, democracy, and mutuality. Thomas Farrell, for example, has explained rhetoric's open-handedness as our partisanship for the familiar and, from within the world of the local and particular, movement toward the other (279). Ideally we would always approach others with outstretched arms and open hands. Yet open-handedness no longer embodies the rhetorical activities, perspectives, and values of persons who share life in cities. In the United States, material conditions and mass media representations of postindustrial urban space, as well as expressions of difference, questions of identity, and conflicts over multiculturalism, have overwhelmed the figure's resonance. Suburban sprawl, the proliferation of privatized consumer spaces, and the fortification of inner cities materialize inequalities that empty the open-handed appeal of its genuineness; at the same time, mass media representations of urban spaces as dangerous, decaying, and violent fuel suspicion and caution people against open-handed appeal. Informed by the material and representational realities of cities, the global sameness and commonalty suggested by the open-handed gesture become expressions of a

Composition's recent turn toward cultural studies a research methodology and a pedagogy grows out of an interest in imagining the democratic potentials of rhetoric.1 James Berlin had been one of the compositionists at the forefront of theorizing composition's uses of cultural studies. In Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom, for example, Berlin laid out the project of a cultural studies pedagogy, stating that must come to see that the languages they are expected to speak, write, and embrace ways of thinking and acting are never disinterested, always bringing with them strictures on the existent, the good, the possible, and regimes of power (24). Yet the roadblocks to such a project in composition in particular and cultural studies in general are that recognitions of the of language can also narrow the possibilities for transformative critical engagements. In the extreme, recognizing the structural interestedness of language, its claims on who we are and what we can do, generates only resignation and indifference. As Lester Faigley writes, the profound cynicism of many students concerning public responsibilities suggests to some the possibility that as society is increasingly saturated with ever expanding quantities of information, objects, and services, the space for the autonomous subject with a capacity for critical thought collapses (213). problem confronting compositionists working with cultural studies today is thus one of actualizing democratic opportunities anticipated in the critical study of cultural sign systems. What opportunities does cultural studies provide compositionists for critically reimagining their pedagogical and research responses to the interestedness of language practices? Our response is to say that cultural studies can offer critical redirections of the ideological motivations for contemporary rhetorics when it conceptualizes those rhetorics in terms of their civic settings. Berlin had already noted the significance of place to rhetoric in an earlier article on the historiography of rhetoric, where he remarked: The ability to read, write, and speak in accordance with the code sanctioned by a culture's ruling class is the main work of education, and this is true whether we are discussing ancient Athens or modern Detroit (52). What is most interesting for our purposes about Berlin's quotation is that he suggests

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