Showing papers in "Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2010"

Rhetoric, Risk, and Markets: The Dot-Com Bubble

Abstract: Post-conventional economic theories are assembled to inquire into the contingent, mimetic, symbolic, and material spirals unfolding the dot-com bubble, 1992–2002. The new technologies bubble is reconstructed as a rhetorical movement across the practices of the hybrid market-industry risk culture of communications. The legacies of the bubble task economic criticism with developing critical capacity sufficient to address attention-driven economies of worth.

Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First-Century Veterans of War

Abstract: Veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with visually identifiable injuries possess “unruly” bodies that render the story of war in efficient, emotional terms. The injured veteran's explicit connection of war with injury motivates state and mainstream news discourse that domesticates veterans’ bodies, managing representations of injured veterans through three dominant strategies. First, dominant discourses invoke veterans’ bodies as metonymy of the nation-state at war—bodily well-being operates as a metonym for both the nation's health and for the condition of the war. Second, veterans are domesticated by strategic placement in contexts that regulate their range of movement, especially amputees, who are often framed as having already overcome any limitations imposed by their war injuries. Third, dominant visual discourse domesticates veterans’ bodies by ascribing a strategic telos to them, shifting the meaning of the injuries away from their origins in state policy and toward wholeness and “normalcy.” Re...

Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute of the Present: The Rhetorical Tenses of Democratic Citizenship

Abstract: Popular discourse and advocacy efforts characterize homelessness as a social problem bound by the present-centered concerns of physical affliction and material deprivation. Wayne Powers's documentary film Reversal of Fortune exemplifies this tendency by performing a “social experiment” to investigate how giving a homeless man $100,000 would change his life: the film chronicles the intervention in terms of an ever-fleeting opportunity that the man ultimately fails to utilize. Such discourses deny the future-oriented grounds for identification between homeless and housed as citizens sharing a common political destiny. Discourses of homelessness thus provide an important opportunity for questioning how the rhetorical tenses of democratic citizenship can be cultivated or suppressed, and how such rhetorical work can contribute to a more dynamic democratic culture.

Performing Embodiable Topoi: Strategic Indigeneity and the Incorporation of Ecuadorian National Identity

Abstract: The rhetorical history of Ecuador is rife with examples of politicians, intellectuals, and artists promoting visions of national identity through images of Ecuador's indigenous population. Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, such depictions became common and displayed increasing emphasis on the physical characteristics of indigenous people. This focus led to appropriations of indigeneity in which white and mestizo Ecuadorians spoke as if indigenous in order to construct arguments about their place in the nation. In the process, they engaged an “embodiable topos” that housed persuasive force within bodily performances of indigenous character. White-mestizo performances of indigeneity engaged embodiable topoi in order to appropriate specific positions associated with indigenous subjects and to establish access to otherwise unavailable forms of rhetorical legitimacy.

“A Hedge against the Future”: The Post–Cold War Rhetoric of Nuclear Weapons Modernization

Abstract: Rhetoric has traditionally played an important role in constituting the nuclear future, yet that role has changed significantly since the declared end of the Cold War. Viewed from the perspectives of nuclear criticism and postmodern theories of risk and security, current rhetoric of US nuclear modernization demonstrates how contingencies of voice and persona mediate the success of official depictions of the future as a warrant for proposals to innovate nuclear weapons. In particular, two forces destabilize the virtuous persona of modernization's advocates: incongruity between the types of risk they conceptualize, and an ethic of “responsibility” that opposes their promotion of instrumental “responsiveness.” These forces create openings for challenge by a rising international movement to abolish nuclear weapons.

Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric.

Abstract: The New Rhetoric project featured an eleven-year collaboration between Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaim Perelman, which culminated with their 1958 magnum opus, Traite de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhetorique. Scholars have long speculated about Olbrechts-Tyteca's role in the New Rhetoric project and her relationship with Chaim Perelman. Building from the work of Barbara Warnick, a synchronic and diachronic analysis of their collaboration yields insight on the nature of their collaboration, putting a spotlight on the scholarship of Olbrechts-Tyteca and the role she played in the New Rhetoric project. Their collaboration pairs Perelman, the philosopher concerned about the human being reasoning, with Olbrechts-Tyteca, the literary critic who, using the theoretical frame of the New Rhetoric project, systematically developed the role of the comic in rhetorical theory.

Everything Is Connected

Abstract: Everything I needed to know I learned during college. Not all of it came from books, or my teachers, although they were certainly important. During my undergraduate years, I learned to experiment a...

(UN)Disciplining the Scholar Activist: Policing the Boundaries of Political Engagement

Abstract: Sixteen years ago, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter argued in the Quarterly Journal of Speech that disciplinary territoriality grants legitimacy to specialists while denying it to out-of-the-mainstream scholars who challenge disciplinary norms. Demonstrating how the practices of writing, publication, and reward defining what ‘‘counts’’ as scholarly discourse systematically disadvantage women, ‘‘Disciplining the Feminine’’ called on scholars ‘‘to scrutinize and evaluate their own rules for engagement and practice.’’ Political activism among scholars likewise calls into question unspoken collective rules, often meeting with a hostile response not unlike those lobbed at women scholars. Despite a rich and storied tradition of public intellectualism in our field, we are most rewarded for attending ‘‘annual conferences to compare notes . . . constitut[ing our] own universe.’’ As activists, we understand ‘‘engagement’’ to entail working toward positive social change in a sometimes uncivil, aggressive manner. As scholars, however, our enthusiasm for engagement is often policed by our affiliate institutions via various forms of depoliticization and/or apoliticization inside the academy. Put differently: Agency as ‘‘publicly engaged’’ scholars becomes subject to depoliticizing norms when we transgress the border between scholarship and politics. So, we might ask: What are these norms? How do communication scholars negotiate this boundary and with what consequences? What do these consequences reveal about the norms and values of scholarly associations, particularly our own? Here, we argue that policing the border between activism and scholarship impedes most significantly the activist scholar who understands ‘‘engagement’’ as unavoidably and inherently political, who recognizes objectivity and apoliticization as institutional smokescreen. Honoring the interdisciplinary history of communication studies, we

The Presidential Sound: From Orotund to Instructional Speech, 1892–1912

Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, the sound of presidential address changed from an orotund style to an instructional style. The orotund style had featured the careful pronunciation of consonants, elongated vowels, trilled r's and repeated declamations. The instructional style, on the other hand, mimicked the conversational lectures of the professor. The shift from orotund to instructional was activated by the arrival of millions of foreign language–speaking immigrants, the increasing power of the working class, and concerns over the effects of sedentary employment on the men who had formerly dominated politics. These pressures culminated in a questioning of the manliness of the orotund style. Theodore Roosevelt, whose manliness had been questioned in the 1880s, responded by writing volumes about manliness and adopting the instructional style in his presidential oratory at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Sophistical Attitude and the Invention of Rhetoric.

Abstract: Traditionally, the Older Sophists were conceived as philosophical skeptics who rejected speculative inquiry to focus on rhetorical methods of being successful in practical life. More recently, this view has been complicated by studies revealing the Sophists to be a diverse group of intellectuals who practiced their art prior to the categorization of “rhetorike,” thereby rendering the very meaning of the general term “Sophist” far more problematic. Both perspectives conceal the common attitude that unites the Sophists as a group and is central to understanding their democratic ethos rooted in an experimental attitude that draws on the resources of speculative reason to serve the purpose of radical invention necessary for a democratization of the productive arts. Recovering the professionalism and experimentalism of the Sophists contributes to the democratic project of promoting the productive and collaborative arts—including rhetoric—that employ the resources of theoretical knowledge to inform collective p...

The Dorothy Doctrine of Engaged Scholarship: The Rhetorical Discipline “Had It All Along”

Abstract: What is ‘‘engaged scholarship’’? For rhetoricians, the concept necessarily entails mutual implication, each term ringing hollow without the other. From the classical theories of rhetoric’s role in the polis to the twentieth century’s formative debates in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the disciplinary preoccupation with engagement is omnipresent*and for good reason. We offer in this essay a definition of engagement as ‘‘mobilized expertise.’’ Explicating the centrality of engagement to rhetoric as a productive practice, hermeneutics, theory, and scholarly community, we contend that (1) the particular forms of engagement necessarily are multiple, (2) the engaged rhetorical scholar cannot operate in isolation from other academic and non-academic stakeholders, and (3) a robust understanding of engagement precludes a rigid distinction between ‘‘basic’’ and ‘‘applied’’ research. Engaged scholarship in rhetoric integrates theory, practice, and production. It is interand cross-disciplinary, igniting and facilitating a dialectic between the generalist and the specialist.

(Un)Making Sex, Making Race: Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, Difference, and the Rhetoric of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Abstract: Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been celebrated for her astute rhetorical contributions to woman's rights advocacy and highly criticized for her racist and elitist sentiments about citizenship and the franchise. Although there appears to be a discontinuity between Cady Stanton's commitment to (sexual) equality and her racism/elitism, this tension is reconciled through a consideration of the ways her early rhetoric embodies, revitalizes, and resists a liberal enlightenment idiom of difference. Responding to immediate exigencies of nineteenth-century politics and an enduring tension between universality and biological difference in liberal political theory, Cady Stanton articulates a view of sexual and racial difference that is extracorporeal.

The Rhetorical Question of Human Rights—A Preface

Abstract: Does rhetoric have a place in the discourse of human rights? Without certain reply, as the dilemmas of defining, claiming, and promoting human rights appear both to include and exclude the rhetorical gesture, this question invites inquiry into the preface of the contemporary human rights regime, the moment of the aftermath that provokes a struggle with language. Grasped partly through Richard McKeon's extended thought on human rights and conflict resolution, including his collaboration with a committee of philosophers charged by UNESCO to assess the grounds for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this preface opens the work of discovery, an inquiry that recognizes how the hypocrisy of “acting words” constitutes a potential for expression which beckons being toward its human rights.

George W. Bush at Goree Island: American Slavery and the Rhetoric of Redemption

Abstract: On July 8, 2003, at Goree Island, Senegal, George W. Bush delivered the most important speech on American slavery since Abraham Lincoln. As an example of rhetorical artistry, the speech is a masterpiece, putting the brutality of slavery into historical, political, and theological perspective. Although the speech had deliberative effects—it grew out of, and contributed to, the Millennium Challenge as well as the administration's African AIDS initiative—it was primarily an epideictic speech that envisioned Providential history as its audience. By adopting the God of history as audience, Bush was able to confess the nation's original sin and to begin to make amends by directing billions of dollars to African development as well as treatment of AIDS and malaria. While largely successful with Africans, the speech left many African Americans both puzzled and angry. The Bush administration could have built on the initial success of the Goree Island speech by extending the internal logic of the address to the mat...

Serializing Racial Subjects: The Stagnation and Suspense of the O.J. Simpson Saga

Abstract: While critiques of racial essentialism have demonstrated decisively that race is rhetorically contingent, institutions of white privilege nevertheless remain distressingly durable. The continuing media coverage of Orenthal James “O.J.” Simpson since his 1995 acquittal exemplifies this chronic temporality of whiteness discourse. Over time, the Simpson case has become a series that gradually coordinated “black” and “white” collective subjects by stagnating and suspending the popular attachment to Simpson. The serial form eventually unmarked these racialized subject-positions, while retaining the white subject-position as a seemingly race-neutral norm. Serial temporality normalizes whiteness through a circular rhythm that vacillates between the disavowal of and possessive investment in white privilege.

An Immodest Proposal

Abstract: Of engaged scholarship, as of many other phenomena, we should learn to think dialectically.1 The pressures and desires that have called engaged scholarship into being are multiple and often contrad...

Telling Katrina Stories: Problems and Opportunities in Engaging Disaster

Abstract: Like most others in critical/cultural and performance studies, we were trained to look at how discourses, sign systems, symbolic actions, and signifying practices of various sorts reinforce or alter relations of power. We learned that art (broadly conceived), criticism, pedagogy, and scholarship could be forms of engagement and intervention in those relations of power, although Stuart Hall convinced us that such engagement must be practiced ‘‘without guarantees.’’ 1 The question for us was never should one be engaged? Rather, the question*always*was over the manner and means of engagement: What form should engagement take? How do we perform as teachers, artists, and scholars so as to be efficacious*without relying on or appealing to some extrinsic or transcendent discourse to serve as the alibi for our actions or as a guarantor of their ‘‘correctness’’ or ‘‘truth’’? Although these questions have been salient to some extent for generations of communication scholars, and while they seem to have become more urgent as we wrestle with the nature and extent of our engagement in forums such as this one, they acquire a new meaning and valence, a special force, if you will, in the context of crisis. And for us, the crisis that has had an enduring effect on our understanding of what it means to be ‘‘engaged’’ as scholars in communication and performance studies was precipitated by the disasters that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the summer of 2005. As we approach the fifth anniversary of those life-changing events, we would like to use this occasion to talk about the problems we face in keeping those events alive in public memory and in making them an ongoing issue for deliberation in the public sphere: and by ‘‘we’’ in this sentence, we mean literally those of us who reside at the site of the disaster. In short, then, we want to address the problems of talking about Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans in the context of the burden of the relationship between scholarship and public/political engagement.

Tripping over Boundary-Stones: Reflections on Engaged Scholarship

Abstract: Erected around 500 BCE, Aeschines and Demosthenes referred to these boundary-stones in speeches, noting that they were to serve as a warning to men who avoided military service, acted cowardly, mistreated their parents, or had dirty hands. Of course, women, slaves, and non-citizens also were forbidden from this significant political and commercial space. My present-day transgression over the boundary-stone feels like an appropriate metaphor for my experiences as an academic: I often do not recognize the boundaries that are built to police me until I already have tripped over them. ‘‘Engaged scholarship’’ epitomizes such a boundary-stone, born of outdated divisions that nevertheless remain too resilient to have disappeared quite yet. Relatedly, Dwight Conquergood argues that ‘‘applied communication’’ puts into question the whole paradigm of binary thinking, which ‘‘function[s] according to a divide-and-conquer logic’’; thus, it is important for ‘‘engaged intellectuals’’ to strive for praxis, ‘‘a combination of analytical rigor, participatory practice, critical reflection, and political struggle.’’ On the occasion of this forum, I would like to reflect on two of the seemingly archaic binaries that haunt the praxis ideally enacted by engaged scholars: political/academic and theory/practice.

Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks

Abstract: Clinton’s speech delivered in memory of firefighters who lost their lives in the Worcester warehouse fire of December 3, 1999, identifies the educative civic functions of displays. Adams points to two ways in which display serves an epideictic function. On one hand, the firefighters themselves displayed ‘‘moral virtue through exemplary actions’’ during the original event (293). Additionally, the ability to share an understanding of Clinton’s commemorative speech as acknowledging the firefighters’ moral exemplarity necessitates that the audience share an understanding of civic virtue. As a result, the commemorative speech relies on a shared understanding of the value of the firefighter’s display as courageous and selfless, as well as solidifies this altruistic sentiment through the speech. Acknowledging the display as possessing a shared cultural value creates a sense of identity in the audience. While Adams notes the connection between heroic acts as displays and the display of a commemorative speech, John Nguyet Erni explores the connection between displays of cosmopolitan sexuality and what he calls the ‘‘ ‘method’ of community making’’ (311). Although vastly different in their subject matter, both authors look to the space and place of a display as the sites of identity formation and find that the recognition of these sites as such provides the foundation for audience members to become a part of a community. Likewise, Phebe Shih Chao’s essay looks at tattoos and piercing as symbolic actions that make political as well as cultural statements about one’s identity, but also are frequently hidden from the view of others. The decision to make visible these corporeal transformations rests with the individual. Yet, the responses to these bodily displays necessarily create and validate various groups of people: those who support the act and those who do not. The constitutive power of displays to create communities rests in their inherent epideictic nature. For example, Mari Boor Tonn proposes that Colin Powell’s life story as it circulated in the media preceding his possible 1996 presidential candidacy enacted a ‘‘‘good’ black narrative’’ (345), which had the effect of absolving matters of race from the media coverage. Tonn’s essay, much like Joshua Meyrowitz’s ‘‘Displaying the Body Politic,’’ shows how a person’s life can function as a display in that it can challenge or perpetuate a myth. Specifically, discussions of a politician’s life can enhance a ‘‘deeper symbiotic relationship between media corporations and the ‘major’ politicians’’ (392), and, at the same time, contribute to redrawing boundaries between public and private spheres. Reading Prelli’s volume cover to cover enables readers to see myriad approaches to display. Visual displays have the power to commemorate what is important, express political discontent, and even tell us about the kind of people we want to be. To this end, Prelli’s collection not only taps into core ideas in rhetorical studies but wrestles with concepts and controversies that pervade our everyday lives. While the essays offer a thorough treatment of how displays function rhetorically, the volume is much more a series of case studies of visual rhetorics than a theoretical treatment of a concept. If one thing is missing, it is a broader theoretical treatment of the concept of display as distinct from other kinds of visual rhetoric. However, the groundwork laid by previous scholars of visual rhetoric is made more significant through Rhetorics of Display. Scholars of rhetoric can learn a great deal about the relevance of the visual, not just as aesthetic, but also as a politically mobilizing and personally defining form of rhetoric.

In Appreciation of the Kind of Rhetoric We Learn in School: An Institutional Perspective on the Rhetorical Situation and on Education

Abstract: Theoretical discussion of the rhetorical situation has been dedicated largely to questions of its ontology and of how it is constituted. Where this ontological orientation has inclined theorists to treat the concept as a theoretical premise, an institutional orientation would instead frame constructivist accounts of the rhetorical situation as a political-pedagogical commitment and treat the ethical obligations that arise from any given situation as bound to specific institutional forms. From an institutional perspective, the rhetorical situation is to conscience as the institution of school is to education. The distinction of both rhetorical situations and schools lies not in their contrivedness per se, but in the inventional capacities their contrived qualities sustain.

Purifying Rhetoric: Empedocles and the Myth of Rhetorical Theory.

Abstract: The polymath Empedocles has not been considered a prominent figure in the history of rhetorical studies nor contemporary appropriations of antiquity, despite the reported attribution of his invention of rhetoric by Aristotle. This neglect is understandable, as the surviving fragments of Empedocles' work provide no significant reference to rhetoric per se. Attention to the folklore surrounding Empedocles (including legends of his deeds as a physician and politician, and his association with Pythagoras, Gorgias, and the god Apollo) is noteworthy, however, as it helps explain ways the ancient Greeks conceptualized rhetoric as a potentially healing discourse. Analysis of the Empedoclean tradition discloses a call to redress any human penchant for violence and to resist tyranny, themes relevant for critical rhetorical studies today. These contributions further demonstrate an affinity between Empedocles and Kenneth Burke's concern with the purification of war, and temper the recent interest in an Isocratean dev...

Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance, by Jeffrey A. Bennett

Abstract: Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), ix + 256 pp. $44.00 (cloth). As the popularity of HBO's...

The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, by Ted Striphas

Abstract: The Late Age of Print is a welcome contribution to a growing body of work on book (or print) culture. Ted Striphas skillfully navigates potentially choppy waters, defending what is of value in a so...

Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, by Judith Butler

Abstract: Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), viii + 193 pp. $26.95. How can one properly frame a review of a book about framing? Topically, I could tell you that thi...

A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, by Bernard Goldberg

Abstract: Bernard Goldberg, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009), 184 pp. $25.95 (cloth)...