Drawing upon a two-year study of student-veterans in college writing classrooms, this article analyzes three types of courses developed in an effort to respond to increased military-affiliated student enrollments: veterans-only, veteran-focused, and veteran-friendly. The article concludes with recommendations for an asset-based approach to professional development for writing faculty

Suggesting that higher education is at a pivotal time regarding the influx of veteran students on campus, this and the following essays argue that faculty have an ethical obligation to investigate and, if appropriate, respond to the veteran student demographic enrolled in two- and four-year institutions. We hope to encourage language, literature, and writing faculty to rethink their preconceptions of war, warriors, and military culture—to ask hard questions about what we know about the wars, the people who fight them, their families, and the public narratives that have controlled our access to “combat operations.” We encourage faculty to engage the complexities of war, to honor the complicated questions and dilemmas military members face, and to understand how those questions will likely filter into classrooms, social interactions, and broader national discourse. We provide our colleagues with an opportunity to hear veteran voices in the hope that classroom teachers can have some grounds on which to reconsider and engage with the culture of war. We have an opportunity to theorize classroom practices that are in clear contact with veteran experiences and, more important, an opportunity to engage with veterans and service members not simply as objects of study but as colleagues.

ABSTRACTRalph Waldo Emerson's theory of rhetoric has been the subject of ongoing inquiry that has moved Emerson further and further outside a line of Platonic thinkers in order to make his discussion of rhetoric applicable to contemporary discussions about civic discourse and the public sphere. Such accounts, however, subtly undermine the complexity of Emerson's attempts to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy. Understanding Emerson as involved in a project to not only democratize language and rhetorical theory but also Plato, the representative of truth seeking and idealism, clarifies precisely how Emerson understands the power of rhetoric and philosophy to shape and enact democracy. Emerson was trying to find a place for Platonic idealism in the shaping of a young country, and in doing so, he reconfigured what might seem today to be irreconcilable dualities. For Emerson the split between the spiritual and the material world does not implicitly prioritize one domain over the other. Instead, Emerson negotiates the terrain between the worlds and suggests ultimately that language and action are means of straddling them and realizing real change in society. If ideals are in some way external in Emerson's metaphysics, they are no less accessible by every person who attends to his or her own experience in the world. Rhetoric, for Emerson, brings those poles together.

Within nineteenth-century American rhetorical culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s contribution was distinct. Envisioning a rhetoric that linked imagination with social action, he challenged the more mechanistic, reason-centered tendencies of rhetorical doctrines influenced by Hugh Blair.

Research Article| October 01 2002 Emerson's “Fate,” September 11, and an Ethical Hermeneutic Roger Thompson Roger Thompson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2002) 2 (3): 420–426. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-3-420 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Roger Thompson; Emerson's “Fate,” September 11, and an Ethical Hermeneutic. Pedagogy 1 October 2002; 2 (3): 420–426. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-3-420 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2002 Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, edited and translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. viii+322. Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation, edited by J. Michael Hogan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. xxxviii + 315 pp. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law by Rosemary J. Coombe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. xi + 462 pp. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators by Rebecca Moore Howard. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999. xi + 195 pp. Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words by Brad Sullivan. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. xii + 202 pp. Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America by James Perrin Warren. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. x + 202 pp.

In the spring of 1998, Richard Leo Enos, as chair of the Lorraine Sherley lecture series, invited James Kinneavy and Linda Ferreira-Buckley to speak to the faculty and students at Texas Christian University. As a graduate student working on a dissertation involving kairos and American literature, I saw in Professor Kinneavy's arrival a significant opportunity to clarify some of the ideas I had been considering. In particular, I had read Kinneavy's article on kairos as a Neglected Concept and saw in his ideas a great potential for the integration of literary and rhetorical studies. Nonetheless, I felt Professor Kinneavy had failed to address fully the transcendental aspect of kairos (best articulated by Paul Tillich) that, I felt, was central to the type of interdisciplinary work I was interested in pursuing. When I approached Kinneavy at TCU, then, I was, truth be told, on a naive mission to right a wrong I felt he had committed. Needless to say, I was quickly disabused of my perception. Professor Kinneavy and I began a conversation on the complexities of kairos, and he carefully illustrated the significance of the term to both rhetoric and literature. Most importantly Kinneavy asserted that kairos was transcendent in that it worked across culture lines and that it offered a subtle way of addressing the situations in which rhetoric is born. Indeed, kairos, he argued, actually explained how rhetoric was born. He felt the term expressed how certain cultural movements and conditions united with special moments to create ripe times for the rhetorical act. In this way kairos was a cornerstone for rhetoric. When Professor Kinneavy left TCU, he and I began a dialogue through email and phone that culminated in the interview printed here for the first time. The interview was conducted at his home in Austin, Texas, in August 1998 and was initially meant simply as background research for my dissertation and an article I was writing. My hope for the interview was that Professor Kinneavy would expand upon his idea of kairos and that he would clarify his position in relation to those of other theorists.