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Showing papers in "Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2004"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explored the role of widely circulated images of Afghan people in building public support for the 2001-2002 U.S. war with Afghanistan and argued that these representations participate in the more general category of "the clash of civilizations", which constitutes a verbal and a visual ideograph linked to the idea of the white man's burden.
Abstract: This article explores the role of widely circulated images of Afghan people in building public support for the 2001–2002 U.S. war with Afghanistan. Emphasizing images of women, I argue that these representations participate in the more general category of “the clash of civilizations,” which constitutes a verbal and a visual ideograph linked to the idea of the “white man's burden.” Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in a set of justifications for war that contradicts the actual motives for the war. These contradictions have a number of implications for democratic deliberation and public life during wartime.

283 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors proposed a discourse theory of citizenship as a mode of public engagement and argued that citizenship engagement may be approached through potential foci of generativity, risk, commitment, creativity, and sociability.
Abstract: This essay calls for a reorientation in scholarly approaches to civic engagement from asking questions of what to asking questions of how. I advance a discourse theory of citizenship as a mode of public engagement. Attending to modalities of citizenship recognizes its fluid and quotidian enactment and considers action that is purposeful, potentially uncontrollable and unruly, multiple, and supportive of radical but achievable democratic practices. Citizenship engagement may be approached through potential foci of generativity, risk, commitment, creativity, and sociability. A discourse theory reformulates the relationship between citizenship and citizen, reveals differences in enactments of citizenship, and calls attention to hybrid cases of citizenship.

194 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors consider the ways that iconoclasm, or the will to control images and vision, appears in canonical and contemporary public sphere theory and suggest circulation as an analytic concept with some promise for helping public sphere theorists develop a more iconophilic relationship to images and visuality.
Abstract: This essay considers the ways that iconoclasm, or the will to control images and vision, appears in canonical and contemporary public sphere theory. John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas enact a paradoxical relation to visuality by repudiating a mass culture of images while preferring “good” images and vision. Yet even when advocating for good vision, both theorists activate a subtle iconoclasm that operates as a perennial tension in their work. The essay concludes by considering the ways in which iconoclasm manifests itself in more recent scholarship in rhetorical studies and suggests circulation as an analytic concept with some promise for helping public sphere theorists develop a more iconophilic relationship to images and vision.

87 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Articulation is a performative concept about the ordering of matter and meaning as mentioned in this paper, and it is to produce bodies, language, and the space of their relative disposition through shared acts.
Abstract: This essay suggests a way to historicize different rhetorical practices—in effect, alternative ways to write genealogies of diverse rhetorics. A certain distinction between culture and nature is a fundamental organizing concept in humanistic rhetoric that has circumscribed scholars' ability to appreciate rhetoric that does not emanate from the subject as conceptualized in Greco‐Roman theory and the theory derived from it. Accordingly, scholarship is preoccupied with the ways that the motivated discourse of subjects leaps the gap between discourse and things to affect the material world. Rather than treating it as natural, the formation of a gap between discourse and things is defined in this essay as a performance articulated through everyday practices, which shifts the focus from human agents to practices. Articulation is a performative concept about the ordering of matter and meaning. To articulate is to produce bodies, language, and the space of their relative disposition through shared acts. Ultimatel...

75 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The essay concludes that the concept of the plastic body is based less on medical technology and skill than on rhetorical power and suggests that this body of discourse has important implications for medical and technological advances that have enlarged the possibilities for body alteration practices.
Abstract: This essay analyzes the “plastic body” as it is produced in the discourse of plastic surgery. The contemporary industry has constructed a popular image of plastic surgery as a readily available and personally empowering means to resolve body image issues, on the presumption that any body can become a “better” body. The ideology underlying the industry emerges out of analysis of the rhetoric of surgeons and patients. The rhetorical efforts of amputee “wannabes,” who seek elective amputation and who use arguments similar to those of mainstream plastic surgery applicants, reveal the paradoxes and contradictions in decision‐making about who has access to these procedures. The essay concludes that the concept of the plastic body is based less on medical technology and skill than on rhetorical power and suggests that this body of discourse has important implications for medical and technological advances that have enlarged the possibilities for body alteration practices.

65 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the concept of communication, usually understood as the mediation or reconciliation of Self and Other, is based on what Lacan termed the fundamental fantasy, an underlying psychical structure that channels desire, usually a subject's desire for the Other's desire.
Abstract: This essay works toward an integration of psychoanalysis and rhetorical theory in response to the poststructural critique of mediation. I argue that the concept of communication, usually understood as the mediation or reconciliation of Self and Other, is based on what Lacan termed the “fundamental fantasy.” Distinct from the conscious fantasies usually analyzed by rhetorical critics, the fundamental fantasy is an underlying psychical structure that channels desire, usually a subject's desire for the Other's desire. I argue that conscious fantasies yield a sense of agency, but only as iterations of this more fundamental fantasy thriving in the unconscious. To illustrate this psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy and subjectivity, I examine the rhetoric of John Edward, a popular television psychic and medium who persuades people that he can talk to the dead.

57 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors used the coincidence of the 1986 sentencing of sanctuary movement members and the rededication of the Statue of Liberty to offer four possible interpretive positions on two ironic political cartoons: optimistic readers interested primarily in the correctives of ordinary persuasion, some of whom politically side with the establishment and others who side with sanctuary; cynical readers interested mainly in the intrinsic symbolic pleasures of pure persuasion; and skeptics who appreciate the appeals of ordinary and pure persuasion in a single text.
Abstract: Ironic texts offer pleasure both as what Burke called “ordinary” and “pure persuasion.” Readers may engage these symbolic dimensions simultaneously, but in different relative proportions. Using the coincidence of the 1986 sentencing of sanctuary movement members and the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, we offer four possible interpretive positions on two ironic political cartoons: optimistic readers interested primarily in the correctives of ordinary persuasion, some of whom politically side with the establishment and others who side with sanctuary; cynical readers interested primarily in the intrinsic symbolic pleasures of pure persuasion; and skeptics who appreciate the appeals of ordinary and pure persuasion in a single text.

30 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The first television documentary treatment of the women's liberation movement as discussed by the authors was produced and reported by Marlene Sanders, a reporter sympathetic to the movement who hoped that the documentary would correct its image problems.
Abstract: On May 26, 1970, ABC broadcast the first television documentary treatment of the women's liberation movement. Part of a wave of media attention that second‐wave feminism received in the spring of 1970, the documentary was produced and reported by Marlene Sanders, a reporter sympathetic to the movement who hoped that the documentary would correct its image problems. Three key rhetorical moves in the documentary—form, framing, and refutation—are used to “fix” the movement, that is, to repair its radical image and to stabilize its meaning by inserting it into dominant narratives of social change derived from generic conventions of the television documentary, from a nostalgic vision of the civil rights movement, and from the media pragmatism favored by the liberal wing of women's liberation, which is shared by Sanders. The conclusion traces the implications of the documentary's rhetorical/ideological strategies for understanding how dominant media naturalize particular narratives about the possibilities for a...

30 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors investigates the rhetoric surrounding the appearance of the concept of the infinitesimal in the seventeenth-century Calculus of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Abstract: This essay investigates the rhetoric surrounding the appearance of the concept of the infinitesimal in the seventeenth‐century Calculus of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Although historians often have positioned rhetoric as a supplemental discipline, this essay shows that rhetoric is the “material” out of which a new and powerful mathematical system emerges. At the height of empiricism, the infinitesimal, thought by Newton and Leibniz to be evanescent or nascent, made available no recourse to empirical or geometric verification. Instead, the infinitesimal found its “substance” in the rhetorical arguments surrounding it, which ultimately precipitated an epistemic shift in scientific and mathematical practice.

26 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Gunn's "Refitting fantasy: Psychoanalysis, subjectivity and talking to the dead" as mentioned in this paper is a significant beginning in the difficult task of thinking out the relationship between Lacanian psychoanal...
Abstract: Joshua Gunn's “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity and Talking to the Dead” is a significant beginning in the difficult task of thinking out the relationship between Lacanian psychoanal...

25 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explain the symbolic charge of Kennedy's economic rhetoric, a persuasive campaign that enjoyed considerable success and marked the first time that a president took explicit responsibility for the nation's economic performance.
Abstract: On June 11, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the economy at Yale University. This essay explains the symbolic charge of his economic rhetoric, a persuasive campaign that enjoyed considerable success and marked the first time that a president took explicit responsibility for the nation's economic performance. I argue that the president crafted the authority to take command of the economy through construction of a liberal ethos, the use of dissociation, and a definition of the times. His arguments, in turn, were invented from the liberal matrix that dominated politics in the mid‐twentieth‐century United States and represent the ways in which that mode of discourse develops a historically contingent and politically powerful form of technical reason. President Kennedy's speech illustrates a set of strategies that can raise the status of one political language above its competitors in the process of public argument.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Lundberg as mentioned in this paper argues that a critical perspective that begins in the imaginary overlooks the master's focus on the Symbolic order, thereby missing the true locus of rhetoric in Lacan's work.
Abstract: Owing to a longstanding commitment to the autonomous, self-transparent subject, many roads have not been taken in rhetorical studies. Our present conversation about Lacanian psychoanalysis represents one of those roads, which is the most radical route stemming from the little traveled thoroughfare of the “rhetoric of the interior.” Insofar as its central category is the dynamic unconscious, psychoanalysis in general represents a theory of an inside or interiority that has largely been ignored, and sometimes attacked, in favor or defense of surfaces and exteriorities (e.g., fantasy themes and rhetorical visions, rational argument in ideal speech situations, and so on). Despite the pioneering work on Jung and mythic criticism by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, despite articulate calls for psychoanalytic research by Barbara Biesecker, Michael J. Hyde, and Loyd S. Pettegrew, and despite the remarkable, interdisciplinary work of Henry Krips, among NCA-style rhetorical studies scholars, psychoanalysis has been the place of dead roads, indeed, the place of dead subjects. Christian Lundberg’s welcome and insightful critique of “Refitting Fantasy” ought to be read as a road sign of sorts, indicating not only an exciting route for research, but also the number of places it might go. In general, Lundberg argues that a critical perspective that begins in the imaginary overlooks the master’s focus on the Symbolic order, thereby missing the true locus of rhetoric in Lacan’s work (principally, “tropology”). Further, Lundberg argues that a critical attention to fantasies is limited to discrete texts and intersubjective encounters, thereby avoiding an opportunity to do true Lacanian rhetorical criticism. The consequence of an approach focused on the criticism of (pre-)conscious and unconscious fantasies, he implies, is twofold. First, it promotes a perspective akin to the project of “ego-psychology” and, thus, relies on the “naive psychologism of solely intersubjectively mediated accounts of subject formation,” which bars scholars from the pursuit of a deeper, more

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the formation of a political order, a constituency, during the 1938-1940 senatorial campaign of the Partido Popular Democratico in Puerto Rico is explored.
Abstract: This paper explores the formation of a political order, a constituency, during the 1938–1940 senatorial campaign of the Partido Popular Democratico in Puerto Rico. In particular it examines the constitutive force of the Catecismo del Pueblo, a small booklet in the form of questions and answers regarding the party's basic assumptions and orientations. This booklet developed a political constituency by mediating a covenantal relationship through discourse in the form of a catechism. Burke's notion of constitutional dialectics is used to explore the Catecismo's nature as constitutive, as a catechism, and as the mediator of a political covenant between the Party and the jibaros.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Burke's work with the Bureau of Social Hygiene informed his rhetorical theory in the 1930s as discussed by the authors, and this research left its mark on Burke's Permanence and Change (1935).
Abstract: Kenneth Burke's employment with the Bureau of Social Hygiene informed his rhetorical theory in the 1930s. Between 1926 and 1930, Burke researched criminology and drug addiction and ghostwrote a book for Colonel Arthur Woods, Dangerous Drugs. An investigation of archives indicates that this research left its mark on Burke's Permanence and Change (1935): in particular, Burke's concept of piety can be understood better in relation to the Bureau of Social Hygiene. An account of Burke's criminological research shows that piety, as a rhetorical concept, involves both embodied and discursive acts. Because it involves mental and affective factors, piety forms the basis for metabiology.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: One of the most watched political events in the United States at mid-century, the Army-McCarthy hearings coincided with the early period of the reception and evaluation of television as a force in society as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: One of the most watched political events in the United States at mid‐century, the Army‐McCarthy hearings coincided with the early period of the reception and evaluation of television as a force in society. Although optimistic rhetoric often attends the rise of new technologies, worries and fears about the power of television pervaded coverage of the hearings. The popular press expressed concern that Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy exercised unrivaled control over television viewers. Murrow and McCarthy became condensation symbols in a new struggle over control of the airwaves, and their highly publicized standoff established discursive rules for thinking about the power of audiences, journalists, and politicians.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper traced the metamorphosis of "whiteness" through its journey from Hansberry's original screenplay to its transformation into a film mediated by Columbia Pictures' Hollywood production and marketing machine.
Abstract: In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry was hired by Columbia Pictures to write a screenplay for her award‐winning Broadway play, A Raisin in the Sun. By the time the film was released in 1961, over one‐third of the original screenplay had been cut. In this paper I undertake a rhetorical analysis of a particular historically contextualized instance of the cultural production of whiteness. Specifically, I trace the metamorphosis of “whiteness” through its journey from Hansberry's original screenplay to its transformation into a film mediated by Columbia Pictures' Hollywood production and marketing machine. Drawing on archival memoranda from studio executives, I examine the studio's editorial suppression of the screenplay as an example of the maintenance, containment, and repair of the cultural production of whiteness. Although both the theater and film version of A Raisin in the Sun unquestionably made significant contributions to the affirmative depiction of African Americans on stage and screen, the unfilmed origina...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the early 20th century, the emerging Chinese advocates for the development of science successfully launched a war against the so-called "metaphysical ghosts" who believed that science was inadequate to address the fundamental questions of human life as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In 1923 the emerging Chinese advocates for the development of science successfully launched a war against the so‐called “metaphysical ghosts,” who believed that science was inadequate to address the fundamental questions of human life. An important and far‐reaching spiritual effect of this “holy war” was to give rise to an attitude of religious zealotry toward the worship of science in China, a nation that had not yet experienced the baptism of science in the early twentieth century. This essay explores one profound source of this spiritual appeal by examining the campaign for science in the context of the Chinese tradition of Dao‐discourse and by viewing this campaign as an estimable effort to maintain this sacred form of discourse. This approach has implications for an ignored study of the rhetoric of scientific popularization in a cross‐cultural context.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the ways that Augustus's Res Gestae elaborates on the conditions of imperial rhetoric and power through the redefinition of the concept of authority, auctoritas, and through a vigorous effort to blend civic and religious spaces.
Abstract: This essay analyzes the ways that Augustus's Res Gestae elaborates on the conditions of imperial rhetoric and power. Augustus's text documents the augmentation of the religious foundations of his power through the redefinition of the concept of authority, auctoritas, and through a vigorous effort to blend civic and religious spaces. The implications of these efforts can be appreciated by comparing auctoritas with earlier Republican conceptions of ethos. Such a comparison clarifies how increased control over civil and religious space characteristic of the Imperial period accompanied the shift in Roman imperial rhetoric, best understood as a movement toward more epideictic modes of address.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines Burke's puzzling work on pure persuasion to suggest that pure persuasion has four characteristics: (1) primarily consummatory in purpose or becomes instrumental or resistant indirectly or secondarily; (2) a near relation of dramatic performance, ritual, and prayer; (3) creates and maintains identity; and (4) relies on form.
Abstract: This essay examines Kenneth Burke's puzzling work on pure persuasion to suggest that pure persuasion has four characteristics, that it is: (1) primarily consummatory in purpose or becomes instrumental or resistant indirectly or secondarily; (2) a near relation of dramatic performance, ritual, and prayer; (3) creates and maintains identity; and (4) relies on form—formal elements are essential to its enactment. This essay argues that an unusual body of discourse, Nushu, an allegedly thousand‐year‐old phonetic transcription of Jiangyong dialect articulated in a variety of texts sung and chanted by rural women over their needlework on red cloth, handkerchiefs, and fans in a remote area of China, may be an exemplar of discourse with many characteristics of Burke's pure persuasion.