Incompatible Rhetorical Expectations: Julia W. Carpenter's Medical Society Papers, 1895–1899

This article examines 3 papers presented before the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine by 19th-century physician Julia W. Carpenter. The article identifies 3 strategies Carpenter used to negotiate the incompatible rhetorical expectations for women and for physicians. The published records of academy discussions provide evidence for Carpenter's colleagues' reactions to each strategy, revealing the complexity of her rhetorical situation and demonstrating the complex links among rhetorical practice, professional identity, and a communicator's social position.     

先秦儒家的修辞批评观——以《四书》为例

重新解读以《四书》为代表的先秦儒家经典文本,对其中的修辞批评现象进行梳理和总结,可以发现先秦儒家在自身的话语共同体内无形中确立了“言说厚德”“修辞立诚”“言闻从礼”“言行及义”等言说规范,以及“察言观色”“听言现行”“知言及人”等修辞批评方法。以孔子和孟子为代表的先秦儒家,在宣扬儒家思想的话语实践中逐渐形成了独特的儒家修辞批评观。     

Claiming access to elite curriculum: identification and division at the Harvard Annex

This article analyses the rhetorical practices deployed by the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women (SCIW) that sought to gain and maintain curricular access to Harvard University in the late 19^th century Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification as an analytical framework, the article considers how the SCIW composed Burkean rhetorics of identification and division towards achieving this goal. The SCIW’s identificatory practices are worth serious attention because of the full range of rhetorical modes these women leveraged. Their identificatory rhetorics not only took the discursive form of writing, but the SCIW also articulated their claims through the rhetorical use of students’ bodies as well as the built environment in Cambridge. This examination of the robust rhetorical repertoire of the SCIW prompts scholars of curriculum studies to expand their analytical vision by considering how groups such as the SCIW not only gain curricular access to elite sites of education but also how they maintain and make use of such access.     

Positioned in/by the State: Incorporation,Exclusion, and Appropriation of Women's Gender-Based Claims to Political Asylum in the United States

Extending an important rhetorical tradition of investigating women's positioning/positionalities in the national imaginary, in society, and in the law, this essay examines how non-US citizen women and their experiences are deployed toward objectives of the US state. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical significance of two precedent-setting gender-based asylum cases, those of Fauziya Kassindja and Rody Alvarado, to understand the different ways non-US women are positioned by the state. These cases reveal that women claimants, depending on the nuances of their claims, are incorporated into the state as “good” women, pushed to the margins because their rhetoric is “threatening,” or appropriated by the state because their “otherness” provides an image that the United States can deploy in demonstrating itself as the “good” state that protects and supports women.     

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.     

“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.     

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.     

Muhammad Ali's Fighting Words: The Paradox of Violence in Nonviolent Rhetoric

While Muhammad Ali has been the subject of countless articles and books written by sports historians and journalists, rhetorical scholars have largely ignored him. This oversight is surprising given both the tradition of social movement scholarship within rhetorical studies and Ali's influential eloquence as a world renowned celebrity espousing nonviolence. Ali's rhetorical performances played a pivotal role in radicalizing the civil rights movement as it (d)evolved into twin forces: Black Power and anti-Vietnam war movements. Ali's rhetoric conjoins messages of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, enabling critics to re-envision civil rights texts. Ali's enduring rhetoric provides a model for analyzing texts and social movements invoking the paradox of the violence in nonviolent civil disobedience.     

Individual and group meaning‐making in an urban third grade classroom: Red fog,cold cans,and seeping vapor

We examined third graders' understandings of condensation using an expanded notion of the Emergent Perspective, a reflexive consideration of individual and group meaning‐making situated in the culture of the classroom. Data were collected from two small groups of students in an inquiry‐based, urban classroom during a unit on the water cycle. Measures included conceptual pre‐/posttests, interviews, written work, and discourse analyses of a science lesson. Although we identified the supportive role of the teacher's explicit assessments of children's ideas, within the small groups, the force that most potently shaped meaning‐making was students' persuasive power, which was in part influenced by the rhetorical moves employed. Specifically, students' evaluative comments (a type of rhetorical move) about contributions of other group members seemed to be particularly persuasive in these groups. Evaluative comments, apart from students' academic status, were shown to be an important influence in not only social knowledge production but also in individual internalization. Our explanation focuses on the particular discursive practices as intellectual resources of urban students, but we are also mindful of the cognitive complexity of the material and the developmental abilities of the students. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 1032–1061, 2005     

The plain style in early anti-slavery discourse: Reassessing the rhetorical beginnings of Quaker and Puritan advocacy

The two earliest public protests against slavery in British North America—the Germantown Quakers’ petition and Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph—are primarily discussed as rhetorical failures and have been largely reduced to entries on an anti-slavery timeline. The texts are further diminished for their lack of intensity compared with later abolitionist discourses. This essay reassesses these germinal protests as dynamic texts that engage and challenge two distinct conceptualizations of the plain style. In so doing, the texts and the plain style are both given renewed significance in the rhetorical history of the anti-slavery movement.     

Political pornification gone global: Teresa Rodríguez as fungible object in the 2015 Spanish regional elections

In this article, the authors examine the political pornification of Spanish politician Teresa Rodríguez and assess the rhetorical strategies she and her supporters used to respond to the controversy. The authors theorize a “fungibility frame” within which women candidates and citizens are treated as interchangeable, violable, and devalued. Rodríguez and her supporters resisted this frame, asserting women's individuality, agency, and inherent value. This case underscores the ways in which political pornification impacts not just candidates and public figures, but also private citizens. When pornified, women are presented not as individuals with political agency but as objects which may be manipulated for political and commercial gain. Additionally, this analysis reveals the ways in which the conditions that produce political pornification may be endemic to democratic culture.     

Banquet speaking

Ghostwriters are here to stay, but their relationship to political speakers and their messages is largely ignored by rhetorical critics. The ghostwriter is a variable in the political process, and a critic who analyzes and evaluates political messages should not overlook the inputs of ghosts who influence both speakers and messages. Critics willing to do the difficult investigation required to find out about the influences of ghosts may write more interesting and more insightful analyses and evaluations.     

From the Parlor to the Barnyard: Obama and Holder on Race

This essay explores Barack Obama's “A More Perfect Union” speech and Eric Holder's speech marking African American History Month as a case study of contemporary public discourse on race. This article argues that in these speeches, Obama and Holder perform the social drama of race relations in profoundly different ways. Drawing on the Burkean parlor and barnyard as metaphors of rhetorical form, the analysis demonstrates the interplay of these dialogic and agonistic forms in motivating democratic deliberation on race. Implications of these rhetorical forms for healthy democratic practice are discussed.     

Review Essay: Assessing Rhetorics of Social Resistance

This essay draws from Edwin Black's Rhetorical Questions to illuminate the role of mutability in rhetoric, consciousness, and social idioms as it is displayed in Haydar ‘Abd al‐Shafi's speech delivered at the Madrid conference on October 31, 1991. Shaft's speech represents a significant mutation in Palestinian discourse. In this speech, the symbolic mold and the hereditarian social idioms that had controlled the Palestinian narrative until the intifada yielded to a mixed idiom that retained the hereditarian values essential for Palestinian identity but opened up space for the convictional values necessary for negotiation and rapprochement with Israel. This essay demonstrates that rhetorical critical theory could benefit from a close reading and application of the themes in Rhetorical Questions.     

Preschoolers Flexibly Shift Between Speakers' Perspectives During Real-Time Language Comprehension

In communicative situations, preschoolers use shared knowledge, or “common ground,” to guide their interpretation of a speaker's referential intent. Using eye-tracking measures, this study investigated the time course of 4-year-olds’ (n = 95) use of two different speakers’ perspectives and assessed how individual differences in this ability related to individual differences in executive function and representational skills. Gaze measures indicated partner-specific common ground guided children's interpretation from the earliest moments of language processing. Nonegocentric online processing was positively correlated with performance on a Level 2 visual perspective-taking task. These results demonstrate that preschoolers readily use the perspectives of multiple partners to guide language comprehension and that more advanced representational skills are associated with the rapid integration of common ground information.     

论《最蓝的眼睛》创作的颠覆性

托妮·莫里森通过《最蓝的眼睛》中女主人公佩科拉的生活经历,揭示了美国黑人女性的生存状况,并探析造成这种命运背后的原因。相比传统的黑人文学创作,《最蓝的眼睛》在创作方面具有明显的颠覆性。文章从语言层面、叙事层面和修辞层面解析莫里森在小说中展现的创作颠覆性,旨在探索莫里森的独特创作技艺,同时丰富文本的研究范式。