Showing papers in "Rhetoric Society Quarterly in 2015"
TL;DR: The complexity of environmental rhetoric is such that its concerns are embedded in both our lived experiences and across many intellectual endeavors as mentioned in this paper, and so long as rhetoric remains wedded to the human and the human alone, environmental rhetoric will continue to miss the mark.
Abstract: Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown argue that the complexity of environmental rhetoric is such that its concerns are embedded in both our lived experiences and across many intellectual endeavors. To think through environmentalism, they suggest, is to think through rhetoric, and both entail crossing boundaries. Environmentalism and its concomitant rhetorics, however, frequently draw a bold line between humans and nonhuman nature, and so long as rhetoric remains wedded to the human and the human alone, environmental rhetoric will continue to miss the mark. A strange environmental rhetoric, which blurs the line between humans and nonhumans, calls for more relations and not less—not a removal of humans from the environment, but another way of comporting ourselves with environments.
33 citations
TL;DR: The authors enriches rhetorical studies' understanding of the relationship between place and public memory by offering a robust consideration of tourism as a constitutive component of memory environments, through a closer look at the memories of urban slavery and rebellion that circulate in Charleston, South Carolina's historical tourism industry.
Abstract: Historical and heritage tourism is a booming industry across the United States, and southern states in particular offer tourists the chance to walk the streets where some of the United States’ most dramatic racial conflicts unfolded. In these contexts, publics are invited to remember slavery in strategic ways. This essay enriches rhetorical studies’ understanding of the relationship between place and public memory by offering a robust consideration of tourism as a constitutive component of memory environments. We do so through a closer look at the memories of urban slavery and rebellion that circulate in Charleston, South Carolina’s historical tourism industry.
25 citations
TL;DR: The authors delineate the rhetorical predecessors of (in)fertility, a term that constitutes both a metaphor in and of itself and a tenor that has been explained in terms of mixed metaphorical discourses of the past.
Abstract: Recent scholarship has called for the study of mixed metaphors wherein two or more phrases (i.e., vehicles) are enlisted to describe a single underlying idea (i.e., tenor). In this essay, I delineate the rhetorical predecessors of (in)fertility, a term that constitutes both a metaphor in and of itself and a tenor that has been explained in terms of mixed metaphorical discourses of the past. Through an initial analysis of the evolution of reproductive metaphors in texts spanning the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and then a follow-up analysis of those metaphors as they mixed together in early twentieth-century discourses, I illustrate how the interaction of a mixed metaphor’s distinct vehicles is dependent on those metaphors’ historical uses. My findings are considered in terms of their implications for positioning individual women—both in the past and more recently—as more or less at-fault for their lack of children.
22 citations
TL;DR: The authors performed a comparative analysis of the rhetorical dimensions of versions of the socialist anthem the Internationale in divergent historical contexts, based on literature on the rhetoric of music in social movements and theories of affect and emotion, demonstrating the differences between class-conscious and nationalist-populist mobilization of feeling.
Abstract: This essay performs a comparative analysis of the rhetorical dimensions of versions of the socialist anthem the “Internationale” in divergent historical contexts. Based on literature on the rhetoric of music in social movements and theories of affect and emotion, our study of two historical iterations of the “Internationale” demonstrates the differences between class-conscious and nationalist-populist mobilization of feeling. In versions faithful to working class experience, the anthem names a basic class antagonism, unites an audience in affective musical practice resonant with working class experience and aspirations, and explicitly demonstrates how reason and revolt, in the words and sounds of the song, may thunder together.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a micro-rhetoric approach is proposed to identify persuasive elements within nonhuman relations, such as hyle, which can be used to identify persuasions within non-human relations.
Abstract: Increasingly, rhetoricians have taken up the task of understanding how rhetoric is applicable to material conditions, yet have found difficulty in approaching the rhetoric that exists between nonhumans. While the debate over the size of rhetoric, big or small, has often dominated discussions, the concern over size is less important than the relationship between rhetoric and materiality. Both “rhetorical materialism” and “rhetoric’s materiality” approaches see nonhuman objects as subsumed in symbolic representations and human-centric worldviews. This essay suggests a micro-rhetorical stance, which avoids discussions over size and builds upon existing formulations of exploratory, nonhuman rhetorics. A micro-rhetoric allows for concepts not previously thought of as rhetorical, such as hyle, which can be used to identify persuasive elements within nonhuman relations. To show how hyle can be used in a micro-rhetorical investigation, this essay offers a brief analysis of the material persuasions involved in the...
20 citations
TL;DR: This article used data from a field-based study to describe the everyday rhetorical performances through which ethos is established when the orator's credibility has been compromised by stigma born of chronic mental illness.
Abstract: This essay uses data from a field-based study to describe the everyday rhetorical performances through which ethos is established when the orator’s credibility has been compromised by stigma born of chronic mental illness. These strategies, called “recuperative ethos,” include displays of astuteness, references to strong human connections, and appeals to religious topoi. Further, the essay describes innovative rhetorical performances, called “agile epistemologies,” which include logical contradiction, metonymic parallels, enthymemes, and expansive views on human agency. Taken together, these terms use the voices and experiences of mentally ill participants to add important insight into the rhetoric of mental healthcare and the rhetoric of medicine, health, and wellness.
17 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored market bubbles as sites of discursive tension and professional stigma, and highlighted how rhetorical strategies of definition, insult, and risk dismissal functioned to sustain market confidence, discredit bubble predictors, and habituate decision makers to evolving market risk.
Abstract: From the early to mid 2000s, economists, pundits, and other commentators engaged in heated debate about the possibility of a bubble in the U.S. housing market. Prognosticating in a variety of public forums, debaters divided along largely ideological lines, with adherents of mainstream neoclassical economics producing a forceful narrative accord that a bubble was unlikely or impossible. Approaching this debate as a case of the powerful discourses that strive to keep markets intervention-free, this essay explores market bubbles as sites of discursive tension and professional stigma, seeking to understand how the allegation of a bubble imbricates expectations of decorum and provokes a constraining rhetorical response. With particular attention to the phenomenon of “bubble denial,” I highlight how rhetorical strategies of definition, insult, and risk dismissal functioned to sustain market confidence, discredit bubble predictors, and habituate decision makers to evolving market risk.
16 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that reporters in the mainstream media as well as Barack Obama deliberately maligned the performative dimension of Wright's rhetoric, thereby misrepresenting it in the service of generating controversy and political expediency, respectively.
Abstract: In the spirit of apologia, this essay illustrates how the rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright can be better understood when set in relation to the black vernacular tradition of Signification or signifyin(g), the Racial Contract, and Whiteness. A sustained contextualization of Wright’s “controversial statements” reveals a complex performative rhetoric that is highly dependent on elements of delivery, especially tone. We argue that reporters in the mainstream media as well as Barack Obama deliberately maligned the performative dimension of Wright’s rhetoric, thereby misrepresenting it in the service of generating controversy and political expediency, respectively.
14 citations
TL;DR: For instance, the authors examines how U.S. presidential invocations of the Monroe Doctrine make use of the figure of Latin America to imagine the United States and its role in the world.
Abstract: This essay draws attention to the vital role that the “other” America has played in the creation of (U.S.) American rhetorics. It examines how U.S. presidential invocations of the Monroe Doctrine make use of the figure of Latin America to imagine the United States and its role in the world. In 1823, when James Monroe articulated what became the “Monroe Doctrine,” the idea that the United States had a two-continent sphere of influence was novel at best. Over time, however, U.S. public discourse developed a ubiquitous common sense in which U.S. strength, security, and even national being have a hemispheric basis. From Monroe’s assertion that actions against any American state would manifest “an unfriendly disposition toward the United States” to Theodore Roosevelt’s lionized national virility and into the present moment, the figure of Latin America—present and absent—has become powerfully definitive for U.S. national image.
14 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a case study for developing audience cultivation as a metaphor for analyzing audience development, and argued that Child's success was not solely the product of her rhetorical prowess or charisma, but also the result of a constellation of extra-discursive elements that both enabled and constrained her rhetorical efforts.
Abstract: Rhetoricians have paid increasing attention to the influence of materiality and context on rhetorical action. However, such attention has yet to infiltrate discussions of constitutive rhetoric. This essay examines Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a case study for developing audience cultivation as a metaphor for analyzing audience development. This metaphor allows scholars to better account for the historical and material contexts that shape rhetorical efforts. Through analyses of Child’s and other contemporary cookbooks, as well as rigorous attention to the political, economic, social, and cultural forces at play in midcentury American life, I argue that Child’s success is not solely the product of her rhetorical prowess or charisma, but also the product of a constellation of extra-discursive elements that both enabled and constrained her rhetorical efforts.
11 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that the frequent consignment of gesture to delivery is rooted in a persistent tendency to treat motions as ornaments that may be taken or left. And they argued for a model of animate eloquence that can be used to collapse distinctions among mind and body and reason and emotion in the production, transmission and reception of persuasive claims.
Abstract: This essay reads John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century gesture manuals Chironomia and Chirologia. Bulwer advances a theory of invention as an inherently gestural form. The frequent consignment of gesture to delivery is rooted in a persistent tendency to treat motions as ornaments that may be taken or left. Bulwer’s gesture theory refuses the separation of action and invention from which this tendency derives. From this refusal, I argue for a model of animate eloquence that can be used to collapse distinctions among mind and body and reason and emotion in the production, transmission, and reception of persuasive claims.
TL;DR: There is no entity that holds the essence of America, nothing blessed with this peculiar sense or significance as discussed by the authors, and a real, true, literal America does not exist as such even though a mass of unsubmerge...
Abstract: There is no entity that holds the essence of America, nothing blessed with this peculiar sense or significance. A real, true, literal America does not exist as such even though a mass of unsubmerge...
TL;DR: The authors examines Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiografia de un esclavo, the only extant Spanish-language narrative written by a slave, to illuminate the reception of rhetoric, or rather his rejection of it.
Abstract: This article examines Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografia de un esclavo, the only extant Spanish-language narrative written by a slave, to illuminate Manzano’s reception of rhetoric, or rather his rejection of it This reception is briefly situated in the context of contemporary receptions of belletristic rhetoric within the Cuban literary circle that solicited Manzano’s life story Additionally, the article brings rhetorical terminology to what critics have observed as Manzano’s developing agency through the process of writing his narrative and selecting its content Providing a view of rhetoric from the margins, Manzano’s narrative offers a critique of the complex relationship between oral and written discourse and the slave’s ability to be seen as truthful
TL;DR: In the effort to address those inequities, a distinction needs to be made between old concerns with inquiry and the new issues any reorganization of inquiry will present as discussed by the authors, where the recent trend in higher education toward greater restrictions on academic inquiry poses new problems for rhetorical studies, particularly where those restrictions exacerbate existing educational inequities.
Abstract: Inquiry’s place in rhetorical studies has long been contentious. Critics argue that academic professionalism and the rise of criticism and theory have diminished rhetoric as a pragmatic art. The recent trend in higher education toward greater restrictions on academic inquiry poses new problems for rhetorical studies, particularly where those restrictions exacerbate existing educational inequities. In the effort to address those inequities, a distinction needs to be made between old concerns with inquiry and the new issues any reorganization of inquiry will present. The generic support for inquiry that universities provide benefits rhetorical studies by lending structure to inquiry processes fraught with uncertainty and marked by impermanency. That support allows for the kind of careful engagement with possibility that rhetorical invention requires. The 2009 documentary film Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist illustrates the value to inquiry of professional conventions and other forms of generic...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors apply a constitutive rhetorical framework to public speeches and letters from 1859 to 1866 by the leadership of the Irish nationalist Fenian movement and examine how the movement transcodes its constitutive rhetoric to better fit the separate national constraints operating in the United States and Ireland.
Abstract: Applying a constitutive rhetorical framework to public speeches and letters circulated transnationally from 1859–1866 by the leadership of the revolutionary Irish nationalist Fenian movement, this essay argues that constitutive rhetorical theory’s assumed ideological effects must be modified to account for the transnational rhetorical practices of movements like the Fenians. The essay first traces how Fenian identification practices seek to fix the entire diaspora as the “Irish people” and Ireland as the true homeland. It then examines how the movement transcodes its constitutive rhetoric to better fit the separate national constraints operating in the United States and Ireland, and how these strategies hamper the organization’s ability to sustain the unity required for success. While the constituted Irish Revolutionary remained in each national context, their strategies for fulfilling the constitutive narrative had splintered, helping to doom the cause. The Fenian case demonstrates the need to render con...
TL;DR: There is little rhetorical inquiry that does not grapple, in one way or another, with tensions between the need for healthy, beneficial encounters with authority and concern for the monolithic and monolithic as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: There is little rhetorical inquiry that does not grapple, in one way or another, with tensions between the need for healthy, beneficial encounters with authority and concern for the monolithic and ...
TL;DR: This paper recovered an influential evangelical theory and method of extemporaneous delivery that contributed to the rise of exteme-poraneous speech in America, and this theory continues to shape American expectations for performing authenticity in public oratory.
Abstract: Adding to the ongoing reconsideration of nineteenth-century oratorical theory, this essay recovers an influential evangelical theory and method of extemporaneous delivery that contributed to the rise of extemporaneous speech in America. The “inspiration of delivery,” articulated by Southern Baptist homiletician John A. Broadus in his 1870 preaching manual, posits a process of ongoing invention during extemporaneous delivery. Although it works to accomplish evangelical purposes, Broadus’ theory of delivery is a primarily secular synthesis of the classical canon of delivery with naturalistic elocutionary theory. Through its wide and persistent circulation, this theory of delivery continues to shape American expectations for performing authenticity in public oratory.
TL;DR: The authors argue that public debating societies that emerged in Britain in the later eighteenth century functioned as sites of invention where citizens could develop dispositions associated with a more inclusive form of democracy.
Abstract: This essay argues that public debating societies that emerged in Britain in the later eighteenth century functioned as sites of invention where citizens could develop dispositions associated with a more inclusive form of democracy. I locate the generative aspects of these forums in the principle of decorum. I argue that this principle functioned as a means for participants to negotiate traditional codes of conduct and standards of speech that constrained interactions among various constituents of the body politic. To illustrate this claim, I focus on the clash of codes exemplified in an encounter between a Quaker woman and a member of Parliament in a public debating forum. By highlighting these discursive interactions, this essay extends current conversations in public sphere theory that call for a focus on the processes and forms of rhetorical engagement among diverse publics.
TL;DR: The authors synthesize Bascom's publications, teaching, and administrative work while president of the University of Wisconsin to recuperate a civic philosophy of public education that integrated civic humanism with progressivism to promote collective identity and shared governance.
Abstract: Revisionist historiographies in rhetorical studies often recuperate marginalized figures to advance scholarship on rhetorical education. I illustrate the heuristic value of recuperating mainstream figures by drawing on unexamined materials of John Bascom, whose contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory have been determined exclusively by his textbook, Philosophy of Rhetoric. I challenge such interpretations by using autobiography and institutional history to illustrate Bascom’s disdain for rhetoric and preference for philosophy. I synthesize Bascom’s publications, teaching, and administrative work while president of the University of Wisconsin to recuperate a civic philosophy of public education that integrated civic humanism with progressivism to promote collective identity and shared governance. I use Bascom’s philosophy to support rhetorical education that integrates participation and deliberation as strategies for civic engagement. This essay contributes to rhetorical historiography by dem...
TL;DR: This paper used a short reflection on the life and work of Father Antonio Vieira (born Portugal, 1608, died Brazil, 1697) to draw our attention to the need to account not just for the dynamic interplay between colony and metropolis, but also the colony's impact on the teaching, theory and practice of rhetoric since 1492.
Abstract: This article uses a short reflection on the life and work of Father Antonio Vieira (born Portugal, 1608, died Brazil, 1697) to draw our attention to the need to account not just for the dynamic interplay between colony and metropolis, but also the colony’s impact on the teaching, theory, and practice of rhetoric since 1492. Specifically, my reflection focuses on Vieira’s Le Lacrime d’Eraclito, a text that suggests that for rhetorical theory and practice the colonial encounter had ramifications on the European continent as profound as those on the American. We cannot speak of an American or Western rhetorical tradition and history without considering this interplay in which the American colonies were active participants, not passive subjects.
TL;DR: Fountain's Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy Lab addresses the role of embodiment in learning and gaining technical expertise.
Abstract: As the interest in the link between rhetorics and bodies increases, so does the need for in-depth studies of bodies and their rhetorical character. T. Kenny Fountain’s Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy Lab addresses the role of embodiment in learning and gaining technical expertise. More specifically, he ethnographically studies the anatomical dissection lab to explore how discourse, visuals, and embodiment merge in scientific training environments. Although addressed primarily to a technical and professional communication (TPC) audience, established scholars and graduate students interested in multimodal, scientific, material, and bodily rhetorics will all be able to engage with several aspects of Fountain’s chosen theories and methods. From his immersive study of the dissection lab’s training practices, Fountain argues that expertise should be understood as a focused way of seeing and acting made possible through immersion in the habitual embodied exercises of a community; attending to contextually bound embodied practices clarifies how expertise is constructed, transmitted, and maintained. In the anatomy lab, the embodied operations, multimodal displays, and epideictic constructions of cadavers inculcate students into “embodied rhetorical actions” (6): practices that emerge from a prioritization of anatomical (structural/functional) knowledge and reflect accompanying ideological values. A key contribution is Fountain’s distillation of key tenets of phenomenological theories into analytical heuristics. In his first two chapters, Fountain draws on theorists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Francisco Varela and roots his study in the phenomenological view of the “two sides of embodiment” (26), where the body is simultaneously an object and a subject. He argues that the lab’s emphasis on anatomical structure rhetorically positions cadaveric bodies in terms of their scientific value, shifting how students are then able to articulate with both physical and conceptual bodies. He insists that those in TPC and rhetoric also need to attend to how “our bodies couple with the objects, discourses, displays, and documents that surround us” (46) in ways specific to our disciplinary training, shifting what opportunities for action are then available. In chapter three, Fountain draws together insights about how multimodality and visuals function together to foster trained ways of seeing. Instead of theorizing how these multimodal objects (such as textbook descriptions, pictures, and
TL;DR: This paper used the specter of Mexican presidential rhetoric (specifically, Plutarco Elias Calles' 1928 informe) to remark on the nationalistic limitations of U.S. presidential rhetoric scholarship.
Abstract: This essay uses the specter of Mexican presidential rhetoric (specifically, Plutarco Elias Calles’ 1928 informe) to remark on the nationalistic limitations of U.S. presidential rhetoric scholarship as a whole. Such limitations can lead to possible mis- and under-readings that can hinder the applicability of U.S. scholarship to other “American” places. These observations are then followed by a reading of Calles’ informe that argues for a wider hemispheric approach to our understanding of “American” presidential rhetoric. Such an approach aims to push our collective gaze beyond the territory of the United States to the point where the rhetorical histories of Latin America rub uncomfortably but productively against our own U.S.-centrism.
TL;DR: In his article “Wine Tasting is Bullshit,” Gonzalez cited a real wine review that reads, “Overall character is that of a sex-loaded starlet; endowed, jaunty and erotically scented, with ever...
Abstract: In his article “Wine Tasting is Bullshit,” Robbie Gonzalez cites a real wine review that reads, “Overall character is that of a sex-loaded starlet; endowed, jaunty and erotically scented, with ever...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner used her 2007 inaugural address to legitimize her political leadership and suggest that she constructed a hybrid ethos, combining multiple presidential images to reconcile competing concerns.
Abstract: In this essay, I examine how Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner used her 2007 inaugural address to legitimize her political leadership. Placing the address within Argentina’s political climate and working in light of the fact that Fernandez de Kirchner’s spouse was the out-going president, I use theories of political ethos to examine the challenges Fernandez de Kirchner faced in inaugurating her presidency. I suggest that she constructed a hybrid ethos, combining multiple presidential images to reconcile competing concerns. I treat in depth three elements of that hybrid ethos: the ethos of a presidential couple that positioned Fernandez de Kirchner alongside her popular husband; the ethos of a woman president building on a tradition of other influential Argentine women; and the ethos of a teacher-expert whose knowledge authorized national leadership. Enacting these varied ethoi, I argue, Fernandez de Kirchner turned political challenges to her advantage and crafted the presidency she would...
TL;DR: In this paper, two primary aims of postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking continue to intersect with the field of rhetorical studies, and language, knowledge, and knowledge are discussed.
Abstract: As postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking continue to intersect with the field of rhetorical studies, two primary aims are articulated. The first aim speaks to how language, knowledge, and rh...
TL;DR: The authors raised the profile of orality by attending to its cultural value and political resonance in historical and modern Latin America, and treated orality as a relational phenomenon potentially instructive in a twenty-first century climate where recognizing the presence of Latin America is a political and ethical priority.
Abstract: Because evanescent oral phenomena present hermeneutical and representational dilemmas, orality remains an elusive and underestimated force in histories of rhetoric. This essay raises the profile of orality by attending to its cultural value and political resonance in historical and modern Latin America. In the encounter period, both the indigenous and the Europeans express preferences for the oral in legal, religious, and political contexts. In the modern period, a progressive political class adopts the oral as medium of choice for strengthening and diversifying civil society. Following theorists Diane Davis, Steven Mailloux, and Walter Ong, this essay treats orality as a relational phenomenon potentially instructive in a twenty-first century climate where recognizing the “presence” of Latin America is a political and ethical priority.
TL;DR: The African Diaspora rhetorics and vernaculars are neither shadowy thugs perpetrating drive-bys on Western Civ, nor viruses that corrupt and destroy the purity of superior forms as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: African Diaspora rhetorics and vernaculars are neither shadowy thugs perpetrating drive-bys on Western Civ, nor viruses that corrupt and destroy the purity of superior forms. African Diaspora rheto...
TL;DR: Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, aesthetics, and politics of the New Negro Movement as discussed by the authors, by Eric King Watts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.
Abstract: Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement, by Eric King Watts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. x + 246 pp. $39.95 (cloth).The Insistent Call: Rhe...
TL;DR: The Prisoners of Conscience as discussed by the authors is a book that explores how disempowered individuals use a variety of modes of resistance, such as parrhesia, indirection, passive aggression, and bodily performances.
Abstract: Professor Hauser’s Prisoners of Conscience is a book that explores how disempowered individuals use a variety of modes of resistance—parrhesia, indirection, passive aggression, bodily performances,...