Revisiting the rhetorical curriculum

The aim of the special strand on ‘Revisiting the rhetorical curriculum’ is to explore the educational potential of a new rhetorical perspective, specifically in relation to different traditions within educational and rhetorical studies. This implies that we do not only look at education in rhetoric, but that we position education also as a rhetorical practice. In this introductory article, we introduce a broad perspective on rhetoric by exploring concepts from new rhetoric to set the scene for this special strand. We elaborate briefly on the relationship between rhetoric and education, which is reflected in the classical concept of paideia. We specifically relate the new rhetorical perspective to curricular issues and introduce the different contributions that are part of this special strand. The article ends by discussing what can be learned from (new) rhetoric about language, culture and education in a post- (or anti-) foundational world.     

Insights from Illustrators: The Rhetorical Invention of Paleontology Representations

This study focuses on the intersection of visual rhetoric with rhetoric of science by examining the rhetorical context in which natural science illustrators operate as they represent paleontology. Field methods were employed to study the rhetorical context in which paleontology becomes represented through art; this article reports the findings from the field study and contextualizes the study in rhetorical theories of invention and a discussion of social versus scientific facts. The research highlights some differences between what experts know and what public audiences perceive, offering insight into why those differences exist.     

Narrative and counternarrative in print‐mediated coverage of Milwaukee alderman Michael Mcgee

This essay mounts a counternarrative to address the mainstream print‐mediated coverage of Milwaukee alderman Michael McGee. In analyzing racialized discourse in Milwaukee, the essay highlights the importance of focusing on rhetoric marginalized in or outside of the public sphere. A clash in rhetorical style can subvert the substance of public discourse with deleterious social consequences. We contend that a true dialogue on race relations will not occur until whites assume the responsibility for engaging in and sustaining this dialogue. The essay also establishes a rationale for why it is critically important to the discipline and to our respective communities to focus on local discourse and discursive communities. Finally, we offer a number of suggestions concerning rhetorical critical practices and the roles that critics can play in bringing about social change.     

A field-based rhetorical critique of ethical accountability

This essay suggests that the concept of interdependence provides a rhetorical telos for research ethics. Current field-based rhetoric work advocates for a postcolonial research ethic. However, this is often articulated with a discourse of ethical accountability. Although it has advantages, accountability limits us by excluding ethical pursuit and reifying people as autonomous individuals. In contrast, interdependence helps complete the liberatory trajectory of postcolonial research ethics. Drawing on work in a recent field site, I argue that interdependence encourages scholars to see dilemmas as an opportunity for rhetorical response and ethical lament, helps scholars take creative action to be shaped by participants directly, and helps scholars explain to others why they pursue ethical actions beyond what is socially required.     

Kosmic rhetoric: Reading democracy alongside Walt Whitman and the Bhagavad Gita*

Walt Whitman’s poetry challenges how rhetorical scholars are accustomed to studying democracy. Adopting an ontology similar to, and a vocabulary inspired by, the Bhagavad Gita, Whitman roots democracy squarely in concerns of soteriology, metaphysics, spiritual practice, and the care of the self. By recovering what I call Whitman’s “kosmic rhetoric,” my goal in this essay is to inspire rhetorical scholars to discuss, debate, and reconsider several of our most deeply held assumptions about democratic politics, including anti-foundationalism and the mechanics of dissent.     

Rhetorical Agency, Resistance, and the Disciplinary Rhetorics of Breastfeeding

Drawing on interviews from a qualitative study, this article extends theorizing about rhetorical agency and resistance by analyzing how breastfeeding advocates and their clients resist medical regulatory rhetoric. The resistant acts that interviewees describe begin with a negotiation of discursive alternatives and subject positions framed by the grid of disciplinary rhetoric about breastfeeding. But in some acts of resistance, breastfeeding women use both discursive and bodily actions to disrupt the intelligibility of this grid and what it deems possible. When such disruption occurs, the results are unpredictable and so must be understood as more than the occupation of preexisting subject positions.     

“Our tears are not enough”: The warrant of the dead in the rhetoric of gun control

The warrant of the dead refers to an explicit or implicit claim that the dead place a demand on the living. The living are called on to act and the dead are invoked as justification for that action: since they died, we should do X. Seeing this rhetorical move as a warrant is useful because the connection between the dead and the requested action of the living is often assumed rather than argued outright. This essay examines how, why, and to what effect President Barack Obama used the warrant of the dead in his gun control rhetoric since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. By extending, expanding, and intensifying memories of the victims of gun violence, Obama used the warrant of the dead to try to establish sustained concern for those victims and thus sustained commitment to gun control. Yet Obama’s effort to transform gun control supporters into gun control activists proved largely ineffective. Examining this partial rhetorical failure offers rhetorical scholars important insights about the warrant of the dead, the gun debate, and, more generally, the challenges of public argument and deliberation in an era of fleeting engagement.     

浅析尾韵、头韵、谐音在英汉语音修辞方面的作用

通过英汉两种语言语音修辞的异同,从尾韵、头韵、谐音在语音修辞方面所起的作用进行对比研究,引导读者从语音修辞的角度了解语言的声音美,语言的传神,从而更好地理解语言,更好地发挥语言在交流中所起的桥梁作用。     

Crafting cosmopolitan nationalism: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s rhetorical leadership*

This essay analyzes the rhetoric of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of post-conflict Liberia, for how it transformed national citizenship into cosmopolitan citizenship. Specifically, she promoted cosmopolitan values to global and regional audiences; codified cosmopolitan values into national policies and initiatives; and enabled Liberian women as citizens whose cosmopolitan practices fortified national, regional, and global communities. Through these concrete cosmopolitan practices, Liberian women performed as ideal citizens of the new democracy. Thus, this essay demonstrates how rhetorical scholars can turn to cosmopolitan theory to explain how rhetorical leaders can transform how and what it means to belong, especially for women.     

A Rhetoric of Turns: Signs and Symbols in Education

In our research and teaching we explore the value and the place of rhetoric in education. From a theoretical perspective we situate our work in different disciplines, inspired by major ‘turns’: linguistic, cultural, anthropological/ethnographic, interpretive, semiotic, narrative, literary, rhetorical etc. In this article we engage in the discussion about what all these turns might entail for education by elaborating on what it implies to read the world as a ‘text'—as is central in a semiotic approach—and by introducing new rhetoric in general, and the work of the literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke in particular, as a possible theoretical and methodological resource. We illustrate its application in the analysis of a fictional narrative. Our aim is to explore how an understanding of education as rhetoric can be integrated into the teacher education curriculum.     

Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association

This essay argues that Audre Lorde's 1981 keynote speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” has much to contribute to communication scholars’ understanding of human biases and rhetorical artistry. The significance of Lorde's subject is one reason for devoting critical attention to her speech, because, in contemporary public life in the United States, anger has abiding relevance in an extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address. Another reason for contemplating Lorde's speech is the fact that anger was a major theme throughout the internationally acclaimed poet-activist's advocacy. The essay suggests that Lorde's speech illustrates a communication technique, shifting subjectivities, which recurs in her rhetorical artistry.     

“A Capital and Novel Argument”: Charles Darwin's Notebooks and the Productivity of Rhetorical Consciousness

With the rise of poststructuralist critiques of the autonomous subject, attention has shifted from the nature of “intentional persuasion” to the constitutive nature of discourse. Although this turn has led to valuable new insights into the nature of rhetoric, it also threatens to discount one of the most vital contributions of the rhetorical tradition—the nature of rhetorical invention. This essay seeks to recover the notion of invention by drawing from John Dewey's naturalistic interpretation of experience. In Dewey's framework, “consciousness” is neither the private contents of thought nor a point of articulation for social discourse, but a practice of manipulating public meanings as a means of responding to problematic situations. I then use Dewey's notion to advance the concept of a “rhetorical consciousness,” which I define in terms of the sophistical principles of imitatio and dissoi logoi. To demonstrate the pragmatic significance of this concept, I then show, through an analysis of Charles Darwin's notebooks, how Darwin employed his own rhetorical consciousness within his struggle to invent the revolutionary arguments that led up to his publication of On the Origin of Species. My hope is that this naturalistic interpretation of rhetorical invention will contribute to the ongoing project of cultivating a more intelligent, critical, and creative citizenry through the application of classical rhetorical principles to contemporary democratic forms of education in both the arts and sciences.     

Interdisciplinarity and Bibliography in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

This essay examines the current state of rhetoric of health and medicine as a subfield strongly dependent on interdisciplinary contributions. While some of the field's research comes from scholars trained in rhetorical history and theory, much of it consists of “rhetorical” commentary by nonrhetoricians in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, and cultural criticism. The author examines questions of the relation of rhetorical research to discourse research in other fields, and considers what might count, especially in graduate student training, as rhetorical study of health and medicine.     

Imagine There's No President: The Rhetorical Secret and the Exposure of Valerie Plame

Covering a wide range of public discourse from 2003 to 2010 about CIA agent Valerie Plame, this essay contributes a novel rhetorical theory of secrets. By contrast to other critiques of the Bush-era secrecy that focus on policies the administration kept concealed from the public, I suggest that rhetoric is the means by which subjects figure the secret, to be understood as knowledge in the fact that the subject cannot know. To make this argument, I draw on the theoretical tools of psychoanalysis and the rhetorical tropes of repetition, caesura, and synecdoche.     

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.     

修辞的目的——兼论语言的非工具性质

人们对修辞的研究历史可以追溯到古希腊罗马时期,可见人们对人类语言修辞现象的关注.直至今天,人们对修辞学研究的兴趣仍然没有减少,因为人类看到了语言在社会交往中的重要作用,看到了文化发展使人类的语言表达需要有更多的层次,并且人类的思维内容随着社会的发展而更加发展.无论是网络语言、文学语言、戏剧语言、政治演讲都需要一个最佳的表达形式即语言来进行表达.所以,现代人类更加注重对修辞的研究,以期待利用修辞这一人类语言强有力的表达手段来实现满足自己思想表达的需求.从修辞的目的中我们也能够窥见语言的非工具性质.     

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.     

Deconstitutive rhetoric: The destruction of legal personhood in the Global War on Terrorism

This essay examines a set of memoranda, speeches, and other official discourse issued during the Global War on Terrorism that transformed the legal paradigm under which the enemy was defined and authorized new norms of conduct previously prohibited by law. It argues that these texts employ “deconstitutive rhetoric,” defined as discursive action that undermines the existing legal status of those to whom it refers and produces a disarticulate, destitute subject by denying the individual access to the civic forums in which rhetorical agency may be exercised. The essay begins with an analysis of the use of deconstitutive rhetoric in the decision to legally re-define Afghanistan as a “failed state” in order to absolve the United States of treaty obligations with that nation. It then addresses the emergence of “unlawful enemy combatant status,” a new legal category not recognized under the international laws of war. The essay concludes with a discussion the Obama administration’s detention and drone strike policies, which have continued to use deconstitutive rhetoric to undermine the legal status of those captured and killed in the Global War on Terrorism.     

Intersectional rhetoric: Where intersectionality as analytic sensibility and embodied rhetorical praxis converge

Serious considerations of intersectionality are critical to the future and viability of feminist rhetorical scholarship and scholars have made impressive methodological shifts in response to this exigency. However, though feminist rhetorical scholarship has painted a rich picture of how intersectionality operates at the level of the critic, I suggest that there needs to be more critical investigation of how intersectionality functions at the level of discourse—how it is constituted by and through rhetoric. To this end, I develop a theory of intersectional rhetoric, which I argue emerges at the point where intersectionality as an analytic sensibility and embodied rhetorical praxis converge. I theorize the ways in which intersectional rhetoric manifests junctures between (1) theory and experience, (2) discourse and materiality, and (3) academic and activist intellectual spheres to develop more nuanced political arguments about structural oppression on multiple axes. I use the work of body positive activist Ashleigh Shackelford as a case study for examining how, through what techniques, and to what end rhetors craft these links in performances of intersectional rhetoric. I conclude by discussing the implications a theory of intersectional rhetoric has for rhetorical theory, rhetorical critics, and intersectional feminist activism.