Frankenstein myths circulate widely in Western culture and offer robust indices of common anxieties about invention. This essay articulates a version of the Frankenstein myth that emphasizes potential contributions to the practice and teaching of rhetoric. Specifically, this essay suggests that this myth about the practice of invention in general can contribute to understandings of rhetorical invention in particular, especially with regard to the extent to which rhetorical invention may, in some instances, be informed by themes associated with deception, duality, and autonomy. The essay closes with a discussion of implications and limitations.

ABSTRACT The value of imitatio as a pedagogical tactic in rhetorical education has been attested to for millennia. But within the context of a culture of diversity, imitation becomes potentially problematic. This essay describes two attitudes toward imitatio that may contribute to modifying the practice in ways that enable it to be recovered for use in contemporary classrooms. The first entails reimagining the relationships between students and their model texts as multivalent conversations rather than dyadic exchanges; the second entails challenging the hierarchies that are implied when students are expected to model their work on texts that are considered superior. These two attitudes encourage the integration of imitatio into a rhetorical education that is essential for the cultivation of a just and engaged twenty-first century citizenship.

In 2008, when Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States, many heralded the arrival of a post-racial era. Some were cautious, others seemed to throw caution to the wind, but there was a widespread appreciation, or anticipation, that something new was happening with regard to the role of race in U.S. politics. Daniel Schorr, for example, on National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) All Things Considered, reported that “post-racial” was “the latest buzz word in the political lexicon”; Matt Bai, in the New York Times Magazine, wondered if “black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream”; writing for Forbes, John McWhorter acknowledged that “nothing magically changed when Obama was declared president-elect” but went on to argue that “the election of Obama proved, as nothing else could have,” that racism against African Americans in the United States is no longer “a serious problem.”

ABSTRACT Quintilian does not offer an explicit mechanism that connects eloquence and ethics. This essay suggests that this omission is a consequence of the significant role that imitation plays in Quintilian’s pedagogy. This essay further suggests that the particular habits of mind that are cultivated through imitation are those that are associated with civic virtue, and it offers some ways that civic virtue might be cultivated in contemporary classrooms through a pedagogy that relies on imitation.

Abstract An unexpected Nobel Peace Prize placed Barack Obama in a difficult position. He was, after all, commander-in-chief of a military currently engaged in two wars, one of which many felt was unjustified. The doubled rhetoric through which Obama managed this situation forecast the strategy he deploys in his Nobel Lecture itself: he invites his audience to attend to war and peace neither as wicked nor ideal but as realistic y interdependenty and indeed comparable modes of human interaction. The result is that war and peace are held in a delicate balance through the force of a somewhat vaguely articulated moral compass.