ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.

ABSTRACTContemporary genre theory is dominated by metaphors of evolution and speciation; this article proposes alternate metaphors of spatiality and exchange. A spatial understanding of genre permits more productive interactions between literary and rhetorical genre theory. A reading of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy as a multigenred text suggests some of the potentials of this approach.

An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa by Philippe‐Joseph Salazar. Mahvah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. 226 pp. + xx. The Insolent Slave by William E. Wiethoff. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 223 pp. Conceiving Normalcy: Rhetoric, Law, and the Double Binds of Infertility by Elizabeth C. Britt. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique Series, 2001. 206 pp + xi.

Francis J. Sullivan, Susan Wells, On Constructing Enduring Works: Contingency and Absolutism in the Discourse of Student Needs, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Feb., 2000), pp. 469-472

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Francis J. Sullivan, Arabella Lyon, Dennis Lebofsky, Susan Wells, Eli Goldblatt, The Reform of Service, the Service of Reform, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 49, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 264-266

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