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...

Book Review| August 01 2016 Review: Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance, by William Fitzgerald William Fitzgerald, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. x+ 158 pp. ISBN 9780271056227 Steven Mailloux Steven Mailloux Steven Mailloux Loyola Marymount University Department of English University Hall 3849 Los Angeles, CA 90045 USA steven.mailloux@lmu.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (3): 325–328. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.3.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Steven Mailloux; Review: Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance, by William Fitzgerald. Rhetorica 1 August 2016; 34 (3): 325–328. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.3.325 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 325 form, or form ox er content? Malm's work is not really situated in relation to extant criticism on Aristotle and his reception, despite the eighteen pages on which the eminent Classics scholar Stephen Halliwell is cited. In the end, I have no clear sense of either Halliwell's arguments or how Malm's account of mimesis may or may not relate to them. Other scholars are cited with still greater opacity: for example, in a not uninteresting excursion on the sublime and its relation to visualization (phantasia), we are told, "The evolution of aes­ thetics can be tied to the ev olution of a new kind of social subject, as Peter de Bolla has demonstrated" (p. 139). No explanation follows. To my' mind, the best chapter of The Soul of Poetry Redefined is its tenth and last, "Emotions and the system of genres" (pp. 171-85). Here Malm advances, however tentatively, a real argument with explanatory force. Addressing the question of whv Aristotle stresses content over style and dra­ matic poetry over lyric, Malm writes that in the Poetics, "The pleasure of poetry. . .comes mainiv from understanding, and from pity and fear which are means of understanding. In this way, Aristotle distances poetry consider­ able' from the Platonic critique of linguistic voluptuousness and decadence. . . . Defining the soul of poetrv as lexis, mimesis-representation would have been to subject it to Plato's critique of rhetoric and representation. The soul of poetrv being muthos, content and structure, poetry becomes less reproachable" (p. 175). For Aristotle, emotions are "instrumental," intended to influence an audience, and thus fundamentally rhetorical (p. 176). It is only in the Renais­ sance—Malm adduces Antonio Minturno's L'Arte Poetica (1564)—that lyric, as the representation of a character's emotions, is theorized as a third genre alongside epic and drama. "The definition of a lyric genre," Malm argues, "could onlv take place by redefining emotions from instruments into objects" (p. 178)—a process Malm associates with painting and its theorization as the objectiv e representation of emotion (pp. 178-83). These arguments, sketched at the end of Malm's study, might profitably be pursued in future research. Whatev er the shortcomings of its content might be, The Soul of Poetry Redefined is, as a physical object, resplendent. In cover design, front papers (of a deep scarlet), page layout, and type face, the book is a delight to behold; its paper quality is a delight for the fingers. The Museum Tusculanum Press of the University of Copenhagen is to be commended for reminding us in the age of the internet that academic books can still be things of beauty. Adam Potkay, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg William Fitzgerald, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Perfor­ mance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. x+158 pp. ISBN 9780271056227 Spiritual Modalities is an extremely useful book. It not only explores in depth the rhetorical power of prayer; it also provides abundant hermeneutic resources for the further study of this ancient yet still contemporary speech 326 RHETORIC A act genre. Creatively employing Kenneth Burke's dramatism as an interpre­ tive lens, William Fitzgerald has written a detailed post-secular analysis that reveals prayer as an embodied performance, a cognitive scene of address, a material act of invocation, and a social attitude of reverence. Historians of rhetoric might question Fitzgerald's claim that his book is "the first system­ atic study of prayer in relation to rhetoric" (3) and place it instead within the loose tradition of rhetorics of prayer (sometimes anachronistically called artes orandi) that stretches back to William of Auvergne's Rhetorica divina and Erasmus's Modus orandi Deum. Nonetheless, Spiritual Modalities is cer­ tainly a significant contribution to the ongoing religious turn in rhetorical studies and the human sciences more generally. One of the most impressive things about Spiritual Modalities is that Fitzgerald achieves many critical and theoretical goals simultaneously and thus his book can be used in different ways by different readers. For example, he analyzes prayer as a specific rhetorical genre and also employs it as a general meta-rhetorical framework. Rhetorical critics of prayer will value the rich illustrations...

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.

Reviews Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges ofLanguage, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 215 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-809-9 "There are only bodies and languages." Alain Badiou's proposition at the beginning of Logics of Worlds neatly sums up the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke as elaborated by Debra Hawhee in Moving Bodies. Hawhee's book is an excellent study of Burke's career-long preoccupation with hu­ mans as "bodies that learn language." Hawhee selectively tracks this pre­ occupation from Burke's earliest fiction through his engagements with bod­ ily mysticism, drug research, endocrinology, constitutional medicine, and gesture-speech evolution to his final recapitulations organized around the opposition between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action. Hawhee's multidimensional discussion presents a powerful case for Burkean explo­ rations of the rhetorical primacy of bodies and language, what Badiou more generally labels "democratic materialism." In her introduction Hawhee defines the transdisciplinary framework she uses to examine Burke's thinking. Distinguishing it from interdisci­ plinary study, Hawhee describes contemporary transdisciplinarity as an "effort to suspend—however temporarily—one's own disciplinary terms and values in favor of a broad, open, and multilevel inquiry," focusing on specific problems by drawing together radically different orientations (p. 3). Burke himself was a transdisciplinarian avant la lettre. His early critical method of "perspective by incongruity" brought together contrasting in­ terpretive frames to do productive explanatory work, and his svnecdochic clustering approach transformed associative constellations of terms into sug­ gestive meaningful wholes. Throughout Moving Bodies Hawhee provides a transdisciplinary kind of rhetorical history. She skillfully tracks Burke's in­ terpretive accomplishments in juxtaposing radically different discourses and tropically clustering terms associated with the body/language problematic. For example, in Chapter 1, "Bodies as Equipment for Moving," Hawhee pursues the "music-body-language cluster" through Burke's early fiction and music criticism to challenge past claims about his purported movement from aesthetics to rhetoric in the twenties. She persuasively argues instead that a distinctive rhetoric centered on bodily effects was there from the very Rhetorica, Vol. XXX, Issue 1, pp. 94-110, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2012.30. IN4. Reviews 95 start. Hawhee explains how7 this Burkean rhetorical aesthetics arose from his fictional interest in characters' bodily rhythms and his critical interest in music s effects on audience bodies. Her account of Burkean talk about “bodies and their rhythmic/arrhythmic capacities" sets the stage for a rich rhetorical story about Burke's developing theories of language, rhetoric, and symbol-using generally. Haw7hee finds one passage in Counter-Statement to be especially significant, returning to it at least three times in Moving Bodies: The appeal of form as exemplified in rhythm enjoys a special advantage in that rhythm is more closely allied with 'bodily' processes." Rhetorical form appeals to somatic rhythms of “systole and diastole, alternation of the feet in walking, inhalation and exhalation, up and down, in and out, back and forth." In Chapter 2, "Burke's Mystical Method," Hawhee concentrates on Burke's engagement with bodily and intellectual strands of mysticism, es­ pecially in his tw7o books of the mid-thirties, Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History. During times of crisis and alienation, Burke sug­ gests, mystics emerge to perceive things differently. As he puts it in Perma­ nence and Change, mysticism is primarily “an attempt to define the ultimate motivation of human conduct by seeing around the corner of our accepted verbalizations." Significantly, a valuable resource of such mystical insight can be found in the human body. Writing to Allen Tate in 1933, Burke asserts that during historical periods when, as in the thirties, ethical systems fall into disrepute, mystics often seek in bodily processes an ''undeniable point of reference outside the system whereby sturdier and more accurate moral exhortations could be built up." For Burke, mystical bodies move thought tow7ard new7 perspectives and into unexpected meaningful associations. Hawhee...

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.

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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.

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