Trashing the System: Social Movement,Intersectional Rhetoric,and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization's Garbage Offensive

Examining the nascent rhetoric of the Young Lords Organization's (YLO) 1969 “garbage offensive,” this essay argues that the long-standing constraints on agency to which they were responding demanded an inventive rhetoric that was decolonizing both in its aim and in its form. Blending diverse forms of discourse produced an intersectional rhetoric that was qualitatively different from other movements at the time. As such, the YLO constructed a collective agency challenging the status quo and, in some ways, foreshadowed more contemporary movement discourses that similarly function intersectionally. Examining the YLO's garbage offensive, then, presents rhetorical scholars with an opportunity to revise our understanding of how marginalized groups craft power through rhetoric.     

Black power in Berkeley: Postmodern constructions in the rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael

In the speech at Berkeley, Carmichael revealed a potential in discourse that enabled him to develop, from out of the confines of a tactical rhetoric, a strategic rhetoric of blackness. Close analysis of Carmichael's speech, grounded in Burke's paradox of purity, illuminates the internal logic of Black Power, as well as Carmichael's use of reflexivity, reversal, deconstruction and re‐construction of dialectical terms and relationships. Contemporary discursive practices addressing issues of civil rights and race are then examined in light of the principles and purposes developed by Carmichael. The results challenge rhetorical scholars and critics to disrupt reliance on dialectical constructions within discourses of race.     

Reclaiming the Rhetoric of Reies López Tijerina: Border Identity and Agency in “The Land Grant Question”

Chicano activist Reies Tijerina's speech known as “The Land Grant Question” provides a point of analysis in this article for assessing contradictory understandings of Tijerina and his movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. The author explores how in both its rhetorical content and form, Tijerina's speech navigated and negotiated identity and agency for the Alianza and Mexican Americans. The speech represents border rhetoric, a type of vernacular discourse that migrates across borders, sustains contradictions, and crafts a middle space. Reclaiming Tijerina's rhetoric extends Chicano movement studies, illuminates notions of rhetorical agency, and highlights a rhetorically-inflected notion of the border.     

Tales of a Texas Cynic: Theodore O. Windt Remembered

In memory of Professor Ted Windt, this essay considers his significant contributions to rhetorical scholarship and pedagogy. It examines his unique contributions to our understandings of American presidential and protest rhetoric of the late 20th century, highlighting his application of Greek cynicism as explanatory schema for American protest rhetoric and then recounting Windt's framework for analyzing “crisis” rhetoric as appropriated by recent American presidents to advance their agendas. The essay then considers Windt's pedagogical perspectives and argues that Windt's teaching itself was acclaimed because it was rooted in the rhetorical and oratorical excellence. In conclusion, it is argued that Ted Windt was a unique and important rhetorical scholar and critic whose life and work provide lasting scholarly contributions and a robust model for achieving excellence in the college classroom.     

Visibility and Rhetoric: The Power of Visual Images in Norman Rockwell's Depictions of Civil Rights

This essay demonstrates how visual works of art may operate rhetorically to articulate public knowledge, to illustrate the moral challenges facing citizens, and to shape commemorative practices, through an analysis of Norman Rockwell's civil rights paintings of the 1960s. By examining the rhetorical aspects of these paintings, including their form and composition, the essay demonstrates the power of visual works of art to evoke common humanity in three significant ways: (1) disregarding established caricatures; (2) creating recognition of others through particularity; and (3) depicting material aspects of American society, thereby reminding viewers that abstract political concepts are always relative to the individuals or groups whose lives are most directly influenced by their presence or absence.     

From small group to public view: Mainstreaming the women's movement

The public attention given to the contemporary women's movement in the past decade is due in part to rhetorical developments within the movement. A fantasy theme analysis of the women's movement of the early 1970's in a large Midwestern metropolitan area reveals an early but incomplete rhetoric, labelled here the pro‐woman line. This was followed by adaptations of the early concerns in a comprehensive social reality, labelled here the “mainstreaming” rhetorical vision. Alterations in key elements of the rhetoric, including the hero/ine, villain, plot, and underpinnings are examined to illustrate how the earlier movement issues were “mainstreamed” into prevailing social views.     

Adam Ferguson's Civil Society and the Rhetorical Functions of (In)Civility in United States Senate Debate

This article offers a theoretical examination of civility within the modern U.S. Senate (USS), grounding the contemporary literature—which conceives of civility as a set of standards for public argument—in the notion of civil society as espoused by Adam Ferguson. Ferguson's theory of civil society suggests that civility within deliberative bodies should be weighed against other factors, including the antagonistic nature of debate and the morality (in a utilitarian sense) of its participants and outcomes. The essay concludes with examples of how critics might apply this perspective to USS debate to reveal the rhetorical functions of (in)civility.     

Environmental Melodrama

Rhetorical scholarship criticizes melodrama for its tendency to simplify and reify public controversies and valorizes the comic frame as an ethically superior mode of rhetoric. These judgments are rooted in the discipline's reliance on Burkean categories, a reductionist conception of melodrama, and an implicit assumption that social unification should be the telos of rhetoric. In response, this essay advances a concept of melodrama as an integrated set of rhetorical appeals. It uses examples of environmental rhetoric to illustrate how the inventional resources of melodrama can transform public controversies and oppose dominant discourses that rationalize or obscure threats to the quality and existence of life on Earth. Based on these arguments, the essay endorses a sophistic critical perspective that foregrounds timeliness as the primary ground for rhetorical judgment and refuses to treat any rhetorical frame as inherently superior to another.     

Ritual and power in imperial Roman rhetoric

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.     

Signs of protest rhetoric: From Logos to logistics in Luther's Ninety-Five Theses

Our paper conceptualizes protest rhetoric in order to theorize the underlying relationship between communication and subjectivity. We do this by highlighting how rhetorical protest challenges the sovereignty of voice. Our argument is that Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses is an example of a sign that protests. To make this argument, we use a materialist method from media studies that simultaneously examines the formal capacities of a sign that protests and maps its historical transformation. Our analysis opens with the two prevailing accounts of Luther's theses: disputation and dissemination. We extend both disputation and dissemination by placing them in a “universal history” of protest rhetoric that grounds many accepted critical rhetorical theories in specific systems of representation. Drawing together our findings, we conclude by urging the replacement of logos and logocentrism with the logistics of protest rhetoric in order to link together disputation and dissemination as a mechanism for both change and subjection.     

Banking on the Present: The Ontological Rhetoric of Neo-Classical Economics and Its Relation to the 2008 Financial Crisis

This essay performs a rhetorical criticism of neo-classical economics, with particular attention to its methodological influence on a number of faulty mathematical models that lay at the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. Going beyond Goodnight and Green's mimetic conception of economic rhetoric, which positions rhetoric as a site of mediation between symbolic and material spirals, we argue that the rhetoric of neo-classicism is best understood as an “apparatus” that attempts to suture two ontologically incommensurable conceptions of time that we term intensive and extensive. We further argue that the hinge of this rhetorical apparatus centers on a kairotic tactic of arbitrage, which theoretically posits, at the same time that it negates, ontological market failure. We end by exploring rhetorical alternatives to neo-classical economics that take the internally contradictory structure of arbitrage to its emergent conclusions.     

A Pedagogy of Sight: Microscopic Vision in Robert Hooke's Micrographia

Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) holds an important place in the history of scientific visual rhetoric. Hooke's accomplishment lies not only in a stunning array of engravings, but also in a “pedagogy of sight”—a rhetorical framework that instructs readers how to view images in accordance with an ideological or epistemic program. Hooke not only taught his readers how to view a new kind of image, but recruited potential contributors to the program of natural philosophy. In particular, Hooke taught his readers to see microscopic specimens as mechanical bodies, as evidence of divine creation, and as pleasant entertainment.     

Purifying Rhetoric: Empedocles and the Myth of Rhetorical Theory

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 development of citizens by advancing a more ecumenical perspective on humanity.     

A Doubled Heterotopia: Shifting Spatial and Visual Symbolism in the Jewish Museum Berlin's Development

This essay considers the rhetoric of space in a rapidly transforming culture. Using Michel Foucault's concept of “heterotopias” to understand the rhetorical power of a building's disposition, it is argued that the Jewish Museum Berlin contains two heterotopias, one within the other. The first is Daniel Libeskind's original building design in relation to the surrounding city, but the second is the placement of an art installation, Menashe Kadishman's Shalechet, in a central location within the museum. The doubling of heterotopian space uses dialectical–rhetorical transcendence to build identification with the museum's message for an increasingly international audience.     

The field of speech, 1953: An overview

Inherent in the rhetorical tradition of symbolic form is the search for the rhetorical processes which convert experience into the social forms of community. Fusing Robert Scott's notion of rhetoric as dynamic with the rhetorical concept of “spectacle,” this essay explores “the dynamic spectacle” as a rhetorical document of community building. Black America's struggle for identity in White America is offered as a case study.     

论先秦和古希腊的言辩修辞

我国先秦和古代希腊时期在修辞学上都取得了巨大的成就。通过从言辩修辞的角度出发,对这两种不同的言辩修辞文本进行对比分析。由于先秦和古希腊在修辞方面的共性,二者存在以下共同点:言者的智慧性、言辞的雄辩性和言效的理想性;而由于文化的差异,二者存在的不同点分别为:社会性和本体性、利益性和知识性、精英性和大众性。对先秦和古希腊言辩修辞进行对比研究,有助于对整个修辞学体系系统性的认识和把握。     

Clinton and Vietnam: A case for amnestic rhetoric

Bill Clinton's 1993 Memorial Day speech at the Vietnam Wall is an example of amnestic rhetoric, which seeks to discourage public debate and to diminish public memory. In this essay I argue that Clinton's epideictic discourse camouflages an act of apologia in which he defends his controversial opposition to the Vietnam War. Second, I argue that Clinton simultaneously directs his audience's attention away from the past and toward the future, urging them to remember the buried, but to bury the memory of Vietnam. Third, I argue that the speech culminates with an act of rhetorical investiture for Clinton as commander in chief. Finally, I propose the concept of amnestic rhetoric as an addition to public memory scholarship.     

Civil Rights Continued: How History Positions Young People to Contemplate Sexuality (In)Justice

Same-sex marriage is part of a global civil rights struggle for LGBQ rights. How this movement is framed, advanced, and critiqued across the globe can be linked to how young people in schools are prepared to deliberate social issues in the political sphere. This article examines national history books as cultural artifacts that present what is possible and reasonable in the struggle for LGBQ rights. It examines how LGBQ rights are defined, situated, and understood within past social justice movements included in the texts. Insight into the narrative for rights in the U.S. is provided through comparison to Canada where LGBQ persons have great political protection and visibility. The comparison illuminates that integrating historical thinking and inquiry into textbooks and placing the struggle for rights within the national narrative may help U.S. teachers give reason and a social justice focus to sexuality inequity.     

Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Drone Imagery

This essay theorizes a transformation in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which obstructions in public sensation insulate war from opposition. In contrast to overt persuasive appeals for the mass mobilization of society characteristic of “total war,” “light war” is a mode of violence that operates more freely by placing fewer demands on public reception, participation, and approval. Through an analysis of U.S. drone imagery between 2008 and 2011, I argue that light war cultivates social acquiescence to violence through boring visual rhetoric that subverts the capacity to sense the material consequences of war. In the process of theorizing the anesthetizing force of boring rhetoric, this essay assesses the prospects of peace and outlines future directions for rhetorical scholarship in a post-9/11 landscape.     

英语广告语修辞中的社会心理分析

本文旨在从社会心理学的角度对英语广告文本的修辞效果进行分析。本文从广告文本中使用的双关,对比,头韵等修辞手段入手,分析广告文本如何通过各种修辞手段营造气势美、音乐美和寓意美,从而提高广告受众对产品的接受度,诱发受众的购买欲望。