ABSTRACTDuring the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are experiencing physical viruses infecting our bodies, virtual viruses infecting our computers, and symbolic viruses infecting our thinking. This essay takes up each of these interruptions in a collective attempt to better understand how we are rhetorically and where we might go politically from here.

ABSTRACT Critical theory is motivated by exigencies internal and external to academic disciplines. This essay discusses some of these motivations, in particular the need to address extreme divisions and polarized conflicts within the wider culture, especially in the domains of politics and religion. Theory can articulate the conditions of possibility for dialogue across radical difference. Such rhetorical theorizing is illustrated in the work of Jacques Derrida and Gaston Fessard, both concerned with political theology. In these two figures, with their different relations to religion and ontotheology, we see notable ways that critical theory emerged out of secular late modernity and its others. That emergence includes a break with earlier forms of philosophical reflection on how communication is accomplished across cultural differences and how the boundary between the secular and the religious is traversed, but the particular content of this transformation also demonstrates a political-theological continuity.

Imagine a neologism enters a parlor. It comes late but it does not care. When it arrives, other terms have long preceded it, and they are engaged in a heated disciplinary discussion, a discussion t...

In early June 2013, a group of rhetoric and composition scholars gathered in Lawrence, Kansas, to take part in a comparative rhetoric seminar, part of the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer In...

AbstractThis article explores some rhetorical paths of thinking about prayer in relation to traditional humanism and its alternatives. It seeks to develop a Heideggerian rhetorical hermeneutics in relation to a nonpersonal, extrahuman model of communication between the human and the divine. Eventually, the article pivots away from God as the addressee of prayerful rhetoric and focuses instead on angels as the name for the finite, contingent conditions in which the rhetoric of prayer takes place.

AbstractThis article discusses two twentieth-century examples of humanist controversies in order to demonstrate some rhetorical paths of thought involved in developing and securing rhetorical humanism within philosophy and rhetorical studies. The article begins with Martin Heidegger's antihumanist provocation and examines Ernesto Grassi's response in his revisionist interpretation of a nonmetaphysical Renaissance humanism. Next it takes up the post-Heideggerian moment of late twentieth-century postmodern critiques, including attacks on humanist foundationalism and essentialist notions of agency, and compares Grassi's defense of rhetorical humanism within Continental philosophy to Michael Leff's reinterpretation of Ciceronian humanism within communication studies. Both Grassi and Leff propose a rhetorical humanist alternative to Heidegger's and postmodernism's philosophical antihumanism. These two rhetoricians demonstrate an interpretive power and a rhetorical creativity that not only revitalize rhetorical humanism in the present age but also provide valuable resources for its extension into the future.

This is a provocative book in which James Comas gives serious attention to the importance of ethics and politics in the formation of our disciplinary identities. The book challenges English studies...

Research Article| January 01 2006 Thinking in Public with Rhetoric Steven Mailloux Steven Mailloux Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (2): 140–146. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697142 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Steven Mailloux; Thinking in Public with Rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (2): 140–146. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697142 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 All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Preview this article: Interchanges: Responses to "Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse: Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/56/2/collegecompositionandcommunication4046-1.gif

John Hollowell, Michael P. Clark, Steven Mailloux, Christine Ross, Responses to "Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse:Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook", College Composition and Communication, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Dec., 2004), pp. 329-334

I often run along a path near my home. Recently I noticed something about my behavior: On especially crowded days I seldom greet either walkers or bikers, who are often talking in couples or riding by at high speeds. But when I meet other runners, I almost always say or signal hello. I interpret my greeting practice as a mode of identification: identifying with others sharing a running practice. For certain purposes, runners might identify with walkers and bikers, for example, in a civic action to save the path from the encroachment of housing developers. But within the group of pathway users, I identify primarily with other runners and, in a certain sense, we form a loose community of running practitioners. This is a very, very rough analogy for what happens at local university functions, at national scholarly conferences, and at non-academic events of all kinds, rhetorical contexts where disciplinary identities are established and reinforced for professional and lay audiences. To analyze performances of disciplinary identities in more depth, I'd like to begin heuristically with a three-dimensional model for locating academic fields in relation to each other. Axis A (Disciplinary Matrices) consists of practices, theories, and traditions; Axis B (Field Boundaries) includes disciplines, interdisciplines, transdisciplines, and non-disciplines; and Axis C (Cultural Sites) comprises ideational domains, material institutions, and public spheres.' Academic disciplines and their subfields can be identified and compared across the different axes of this model. For example, the disciplinary matrix of English Studies includes interpretive practices for critically reading, researching, and teaching texts; aesthetic and other theories for defining textual objects of study; and evolving traditions of texts to be described, compared, and evaluated (canons of literary, critical, and theoretical works). In the twentieth century, English as this matrix of practices, theories, and traditions (Axis A) was identified as a separate discipline (Axis B) with its own ideational domain in relation to other disciplines and its own subfields, institutionalized as an academic department within the

Abstract This essay explores some rhetorical paths of thought connecting the discipline of English Studies and Speech Communication. I focus on the rhetoric of science during two periods of disciplinary development: the use of scientific rhetoric to articulate new disciplinary identities in the 1910s and the debates over the rhetorical study of science in the 1990s. The transition from the former to the latter period was significantly affected by what might be called a rhetorical hermeneutics developed around 1960 by Chaim Perelman, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn. The establishment of Composition Studies provides an example of the changed rhetorical context for disciplinary legitimation in the late twentieth century. The main purpose of this rhetorical history is to encourage renewed dialogue among rhetoricians studying Literature, Composition, and Communication.

Discusses the topic of reading typographical errors as an example of archival work. Suggests that reading typos is a practice within textual scholarship which is a rather venerable if now somewhat overshadowed tradition of humanistic research and pedagogy. Begins with two examples of typo reading and then presents some general claims about editing as a paradigm for critical interpretation.