The rhetorical appeals of whites to blacks during reconstruction

The emancipation of slaves placed new rhetorical demands upon white spokesmen in the South. To maintain their racial authority, whites refined two rhetorical appeals conceived in slavery: a rhetorical bribe and a rhetorical threat.     

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.     

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.     

Towards an insistent and transformative racial rhetorical criticism

ABSTRACT

Racial rhetorical criticism is a scholarly project that maps the rhetoricity of race and whiteness. Emerging in and through the intellectual labor of rhetorical scholars invested in critical explorations of race, racial rhetorical criticism is necessarily nimble, attentive to the ever-shifting yet always fixed parameters of race and whiteness. In this reflection, I advance two commitments of racial rhetorical criticism that emerge across the forum: critical vulnerability and obstinate intersectionality. Together, these two intellectual practices interrupt the static force of the canon as they produce transformative inclusion.     

Sitting in Silence: Managing Aural Body Rhetoric in Public Restrooms

Proposing an enhancement to the concepts of verbal and corporeal rhetorics, this article offers the concept of aural body rhetoric, arguing that nonvocal sounds produced by the body can also provide rhetorical messages, create rhetorical challenges and prompt the conscious management of bodily sounds, particularly in panopticonic spaces (panauricons) in which the body is hidden from view. Using the urinary sounds made by transsexual men in public restrooms as an example, this article examines this space as a panauricon that creates a rhetorical challenge for these men and has prompted the dissemination of various rhetorical strategies within the community of transmen in the United States.     

Some characteristics of the black religious audience

Rhetorical critics have no consensually acceptable understanding of their enterprise because theoretical discussions of the nature of rhetorical criticism have been conducted from within the stances of the natural attitude. The reflective attitude, in contrast, reveals the shared assumptions and procedures of all rhetorical critics, regardless of their particular theories and methods. The reflective attitude is thus required in formulating an acceptable understanding of rhetorical criticism as a form of experience.     

“Shalom Achshav”—Rituals of the Israeli peace movement

Rhetorical critics have ignored the study of non‐western movements and have not paid serious attention to the construction of theories which help to explain and interpret the rhetorical form of movements. This study attempts to fill both voids by synthesizing concepts from rhetorical theory and anthropology to explain the linguistic process which made up the Israeli peace movement. An assessment of the rhetorical strategies, a listing of the indirect consequences of the movement, and the implications of the study to the development of rhetorical theory is provided to complete the critical act.     

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.     

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.     

Cocoon Minorities: Understanding Rush Limbaugh's Co-option of the Rhetorical Strategies of the Disenfranchised Position Through Homological Analysis

Conceptualizing minority social and political groups calls for careful consideration of power, prestige, and numerical systems. However, when members of empowered groups self-identify as disenfranchised, they create unique rhetorical situations. Through homological analysis of the rhetorical tactics of Rush Limbaugh matched with an analysis of Sandra Fluke's rhetorical strategies, we assert that subtle co-option of communication tactics poses larger questions about self-identification of individuals as minority members within social and political systems.     

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.     

Dimensions of Instructor Disclosure: Implications for Rhetorical and Relational Goals of Instruction

There are an array of reasons why instructors view personal disclosures as beneficial for the classroom, including to demonstrate caring and to make content relevant. Using the rhetorical and relational goals of instruction theory as the theoretical model, this study tested the potential for the three dimensions of disclosure (i.e., amount, negativity, relevance) to account for variance in instructor rhetorical goals (i.e., relevance) and relational goals (i.e., caring). The results highlight the importance of relevant instructor disclosures to perceiving an instructor as achieving rhetorical and relational goals within the classroom.     

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.     

The edifice metaphor in rhetorical theory

The literature of rhetorical theory reveals a persistent sense of relation between the arts of rhetoric and architecture. The following essay looks first to assumptions of a germinal relation of force between the arts; and next, to assumptions of an analogical relation of form. The latter relation, developed primarily in terms of the “edifice metaphor,” is traced chronologically to the point of its decline among rhetorical theorists of the present century. Concluding suggestions are offered in explanation of the decline of the metaphor, and in affirmation of the need for viable new figures to express the processes of rhetorical disposition.     

The corpus of Daniel Pearl

Acts of terrorism and their presence in mass media have long intrigued scholars throughout a wide range of academic disciplines. The kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl and the subsequent release of a videotape that made his execution public on a global scale raise substantive questions regarding the rhetorical nature of such acts and the competing nationalist discourses that make claims on the human body. This essay traces the role of Pearl's body in discourses that constitute Pakistani and American nationalist identities. Through a rhetorical analysis of the execution videotape and news reports in both countries, the role of the human body as a rhetorical resource within the mediated discourse on terrorism is elucidated.     

Roe v. Wade: The rhetoric of fetal life

Court decisions themselves, and not just arguments before courts, are rhetorical works. The Supreme Court majority opinion in the publicized 1973 abortion case Roe v. Wade demonstrated this rhetorical nature of decisions both in its choice of arguments and evidence and in its effort to organize symbolically the world of the medical and legal considerations surrounding abortion.     

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.     

Bordering Populism in Immigration Activism: Outlaw–Civic Discourse in a (Counter)Public

This study involved a rhetorical ethnography and textual analyses of an anti-immigration group over a six month period. I argue the collective engaged in a deleterious form of bordering populism, in which communicators continually attack and praise the same targets. This populism was generated by outlaw–civic shifts between marginalized, outsider stances, and more official, general cultural logics. The group demonstrated a fragile, fracturing approach to a public issue, and local, vernacular practices that are employed to bridge pressures for agitative and integrative movement communication in a pluralistic, globalizing environment. Overall, each of the group's stark rhetorical shifts for and against the government, businesses, and immigrants concurrently crafted and dismantled rhetorical borders, creating an unstable (counter)public forgoing the possibility of democratic communication and community.     

Rhetorical detailing in Cicero's Verrine orations

This article offers answers to three questions: Why, after his courtroom victory in the Verrine case, did Cicero publish his speech? What changes in his rhetorical theory are reflected in the speech? What principles of narrative suasion is Cicero using in the many stories he incorporates within the speech? The concept of rhetorical detailing is proposed as a key element in the probable answer to each question.     

Psychotherapy as a rhetoric for secular grace

The rhetoric of psychotherapy is largely overlooked by scholars. The author explores the relationship between psychotherapy, religion, and rhetoric. Rhetoric is defined, pertinent literature is reviewed, and psychotherapy is viewed as a response to a rhetorical situation by using three rhetorical strategies.