Symbolic convergence and special communication theories: Sensing and examining dis/enchantment with the theoretical robustness of critical auto ethnography

This study answers 4 research questions as it explicates the SCT's ability to explain how special communication theories come into being as the product of rhetorical visions that contain the norms, conventions, and customs for exemplar participation in a specific communication style. This study demonstrates that the concept of rhetorical vision yields insights into the creation, rise, and potential for demise of a style‐specific, special theory of communication named the critical autoethnography special theory (CAST). The study reports that the CAST itself is a symbolically created product of the critical autoethnographic rhetorical vision (CARV). The study's findings indicate that CARV's life‐cycle is congruent with those of other rhetorical visions and would predict that the CARV may well implode upon itself as it contains the seeds of its own destruction.     

Rhetorical theory as message reception: A cognitive response approach to rhetorical theory and criticism

Traditional rhetorical theory tends to adopt the rhetor's point of view, emphasizing invention of rhetorical messages, rather than the audience's reception and interpretation of messages. The audience is ordinarily conceptualized in humanistic rhetorical theory as a target, a source of expectations to guide the rhetor's invention, a means to accomplish the rhetor's ends, or even an obstacle. We argue that a more complete view of rhetoric should include the audience as a potentially active part of the process of persuasion. Accordingly, we propose to supplement our traditional theories of rhetoric by sketching a complementary view of rhetoric as the process of an auditor's processing and responding to messages. The inspiration for this conception, Petty and Cacioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model, is sketched, and implications for rhetorical theory and criticism are discussed.     

The call of conscience,rhetorical interruptions,and the euthanasia controversy

Emmanuel Levinas writes of how the “call of conscience”; is a “primordial discourse”; that “interrupts”; the routines and language‐games that help organize and give meaning to a person's everyday existence. Levinas thus provides a way of thinking about the relationship between the call of conscience and rhetoric that advances what rhetorical theorists have so far claimed about this relationship. This essay develops the position that the call of conscience is a rhetorical interruption in its purest form. A case study is offered to illustrate how such an interruption manifests itself in the debate over the justifiability and social acceptability of physician‐assisted suicide. The specific rhetorical transaction in question occurred in cyberspace and lasted five months; it began when members of a disability civil rights group known as “Not Dead Yet!”; conducted what their opponents described as an “invasion”; of an electronic mailing list operated by the Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization.     

Enactment as rhetorical strategy in the year of living dangerously

In The Year of Living Dangerously, the philosophical position that is argued in the film's content is reflected also in the film's form; i.e., the film is an enactment of the argument it makes. Failure to recognize enactment as a viable rhetorical strategy may have led to a failure to recognize the film's rhetorical force. Further study of enactment and its rhetorical effectiveness are suggested.     

Jimmy Carter and the rhetoric of charisma

Jimmy Carter's unusual success in the Presidential Primaries of 1976 has been the subject of much discussion. One rhetorical explanation posits that Carter's message may be described in terms of Weber's concept of charisma, and Bormann's theory of rhetorical vision. The charismatic message was caught up in a unique rhetorical situation, the social fantasies attending the Bicentennial Celebration. Carter's rhetoric and the people's fantasies transcended along similar lines. This confluence helped to carry Carter to the White House.     

Learning to use information: Informed learning in the undergraduate classroom

Informed learning is a pedagogy that focuses on learning subject content through engaging with academic or professional information practices. Adopting the position that more powerful learning is achieved where students are taught how to use information and subject content simultaneously, the research reported here investigated an informed learning lesson. Using phenomenographic methods, students' experiences of the lesson were compared with observations of how the lesson was enacted in the classroom. Based on an analysis of student interviews using variation theory, different ways of experiencing the informed learning lesson emerged. Some students understood the lesson to be about learning to use information, i.e., researching and writing an academic paper, while others understood it as focusing on understanding both subject content and information use simultaneously. Although the results of this study are highly contextualized, the findings suggest criteria to consider when designing informed learning lessons.     

The rhetorical functions of consciousness‐raising in third wave feminism

The rhetorical practice of consciousness‐raising has changed since communication theorists first began to apply its functions and style, as a small group, face‐to‐face practice, in the early 1970s. In this essay, we argue that in feminist activism and theory, the practice of consciousness‐raising has evolved in response to shifting cultural conditions. Our examination of consciousness‐raising rhetoric produced by self‐labeled “third wave” feminists reveals how contemporary social contexts have generated different rhetorical problems and discursive responses for feminists. Specifically, we show how third wave feminist consciousness‐raising instills a critical perspective that focuses on personal and social injustices. We argue that these rhetorical responses raise consciousness in the public sphere, through mass media, popular culture, and college classrooms, fostering both public and private dialogue about gender inequities that aims at self‐persuasion.     

The evolutionary sublime and the essay of natural history

The rhetorical foundations of social change may be found, not only in polemical discourse but in popular literary discourse as well. A case in point is that of the concept of the evolutionary sublime, an amalgam of the rhetorical/aesthetic theory of the sublime and scientific evolutionary theory, which had significant implications for personal morality and social policy. This reservoir of concepts was transmitted to its readership, the American middle class of the nineteenth century, through the popular literature of natural history; it subsequently served as a basis for the persuasive arguments of the conservation movement. This study traces the emergence of rhetorical argument from bases in popular literary and intellectual culture.     

All of us phantasmic saviors

Drawing from interviews and conversations with US American volunteers at an international aid organization in Tanzania, I argue that the subject constitution of US volunteers is dependent upon foreclosures that remove questions of their colonial and racial presence from conscious awareness. I explain how these foreclosures are covered by a white savior fantasy, and trace how volunteers at this particular organization use two primary tools to avoid facing their foreclosures and traversing their fantasies: denial and irony. In conclusion, I explore the implications of this study for reflexivity in critical rhetorical fieldwork, as well as aid practice.     

Beyond genre theory: The genesis of rhetorical action

In this essay, I contend that traditional genre theory has an important inherent limitation: It assumes that a single controlling characteristic (often, but not exclusively, situation) is responsible for (and explains) the production of a genre of rhetoric. In contrast, the theory of the Genesis of Rhetorical Action holds that four Burkean ratios—scene‐act, purpose‐act, rhetor‐act, and agency‐act—can be employed to explain how rhetorical discourse occurs (invention). After arguing that the theory of the Genesis of Rhetorical Action is a potentially powerful extension of genre theory on conceptual grounds (and noting that published genre studies reveal the limitations of this theory), I provide empirical evidence from the analysis of rhetorical discourse (research on the Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse) to reinforce this argument. A new conception of genre theory is then advocated.     

Technical documents as rhetorical agency

This research argues that documents can become intermediaries which affect the relationships between disparate groups. Through a critical analysis of materials distributed during an online protest, the author traces the life of a single technical document, simultaneously describing how it was described during deliberation between several groups. Marcusean critical theory and rhetorical criticism framed the analysis. It is suggested that certain documents act as a locus between otherwise unaffiliated groups and that those documents become agents who can mediate deliberation. Further, it is suggested that document analysis can become an important aspect for interpreting group relationships. Future research examining the agency of documents is suggested.     

Readers theatre bibliography

Several recent developments in rhetorical theory display a disturbing tendency to overemphasize change at the expense of enduring elements of the rhetorical tradition. These tendencies, which include attention to symbolism as an end in itself and accentuation of rhetorical methodology over substantive considerations, obfuscate the core concepts of rhetoric and detract from the purposes of a fully humane rhetoric. In contrast, a renewed sense of the permanent aspects of the rhetorical tradition is found in the centrality of language in human experience and is manifest in several key dimensions. Language as a means of exploration and education, as a form of social transformation, and as a means of vision and valuation are discussed as constituting a permanent core in rhetorical theory and forming the basis of rhetoric as a humane and, substantive art.     

The Gender of Water and the Pleasure of Alienation: A Critical Analysis of Visiting Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam, located on the Arizona-Nevada border and damming the Colorado River, is a well-known and often-visited place. The meanings people assign to such a structure articulate key environmental, economic and technological ideologies. An exploration of those meanings is important for understanding the forces that shape public perception and environmental policy. Specifically, this essay examines the official rhetoric of Hoover Dam from an ecofeminist perspective. Through a critical reading of the educational displays, films, plaques and other texts as well as the physical structure of the dam itself, three rhetorical strategies used in the dam's official presentation are identified. First, the Bureau of Reclamation presents the Colorado River as a chaotic, feminine entity in need of masculine control. Second, the river's rhetorical status as an Other encourages audiences to identify with the subject position of nature's master and thereby participate in the pleasures such an identity offers. Third, the Bureau uses the prevalent “common sense” of Native Americans as environmentally sensitive in combination with an “historical” Native American voice to establish the dam as both environmentally sound and a logical step in humanity's progress toward economic development and dominion over nature.     

The Self-Governing Journal

This article offers a distinctively rhetorical perspective on civil society that critically evaluates the relevant communication networks and informal associations in terms of their ability to mediate citizen understandings of public issues and facilitate effective public advocacy and rhetorical action. Particularly important is the role of rhetorical invention. By providing the space in which citizens collaborate, deliberate on issues of public importance, and plan courses of action, civil society acts as a type of incubator for rhetorical invention. The Highlander Folk School serves as an exemplar of how associations of civil society facilitate political awareness and democratic action. The conclusion considers potential advantages of studying civil society from a rhetorical perspective, using the Highlander case and its contributions to the civil rights movement as a starting point from which to address the interrelationships among civil society, democratic action, and rhetorical invention.     

Tense Futures: The Work of Cultural Studies

Currently, scholars grapple with media that depict Third World women as either victims of unchanging contexts or agents of liberation. To explore how a widely distributed and popular documentary film can destabilize a First World gaze, this essay examines Iron Ladies of Liberia (ILL), which traced Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's first year as president of Liberia. ILL foregrounded women's rhetorical and political agencies to alter a postwar context, while it also situated their agencies within an enabling and constraining constellation of power relationships. Through its unique relationships between filmmaker and subject, ILL suggested a transnational feminist perspective on women in media.     

Seriality and Multicultural Dissent in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

“Seriality” is a useful critical heuristic for engaging the contours of identity politics, as it recognizes the limits of essentialism and simultaneously acknowledges its frequent necessity for accomplishing goals and building coalitions. Using contemporary debates about same-sex marriage, this essay places seriality into conversation with rhetorical theory to explore the discursive possibilities of this conceptual practice. While seriality focuses explicitly on the “practico-inert” materiality of objects, this analysis argues that the rhetorical features of seriality should be given more light to offer support for those valuing difference in democratic politics.     

The bear in the back yard: Myth,ideology, and victimage ritual in soviet funerals

A longitudinal myth analysis of American news magazine reports on the USSR reveals a pattern of image‐clusters that endures from the time of Stalin's funeral to Brezhnev's, almost 30 years later. A Russophobic worldview is explored through a symbolic vocabulary in which clusters of images cohere into a few dominant, generative myths. It is argued that the resultant rhetorical vision, which chains out across three major news magazines over a 30 year period, functions as victimage ritual. Through this rhetorical form, a society that repeatedly espouses peace can cathartically be relieved of the guilt it might otherwise feel as it drifts into another Cold War. It is dramatistically purified by imagining an enemy that is coercive, irrational, visceral, cunning, animalistic, thus simplifying the complexities of culpability. What remains to be studied is how recurrent myths are perpetuated over long periods of time, and how the ideologies they fashion produce an effect on individual consciousness.     

Visualizing the Rhetorical Presidency: Barack Obama in the Situation Room

On the night of May 1, 2011, almost 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, President Obama announced on live television that Osama bin Laden was dead. The next day, the Situation Room photograph was released, revealing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how tense it was at the White House while the mission was underway. Building on previous scholarship about the rhetorical presidency and visual rhetoric, this essay analyzes how the photograph, combined with the context of Obama's speech the night of the raid, contributes to the increasingly visual aspect of the rhetorical presidency and creates an image of Obama as a strong commander in chief.     

Ronald Reagan and Humor: A politician's velvet weapon

The use of humor was an important aspect of Ronald Reagan's rhetorical appeal. Three major theories of humor have been suggested in the development of the literature: the relief theory, involving emotional release of tension; the incongruity theory, where the cognitive functioning reacts to unexpected input; and the superiority theory, which holds that humor results from feeling superior to others, who may be considered disobedient or somehow “wrong.” The application of the theories to Reagan's humor shows how he used humor to criticize authority without being perceived as too harsh or negative, as well as to promote positive feelings from his audiences.