Recursivity: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Mnesis

This essay proposes the genealogical study of remembering and forgetting as recursive rhetorical capacities that enable discourse to place itself in an ever-changing present. Mnesis is a meta-concept for the arrangements of remembering and forgetting that enable rhetoric to function. Most of the essay defines the materiality of mnesis, first noting the limitations of studying recursivity within dominant approaches remembering and forgetting in rhetorical studies, then describing mnesis as the performative necessity to fold the past into the present so as to provide “now” with a sense of place. After setting a foundation, the essay closes with a sketch of how to produce a genealogy of recursion.     

Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language

In 1923 the emerging Chinese advocates for the development of science successfully launched a war against the so‐called “metaphysical ghosts,” who believed that science was inadequate to address the fundamental questions of human life. An important and far‐reaching spiritual effect of this “holy war” was to give rise to an attitude of religious zealotry toward the worship of science in China, a nation that had not yet experienced the baptism of science in the early twentieth century. This essay explores one profound source of this spiritual appeal by examining the campaign for science in the context of the Chinese tradition of Dao‐discourse and by viewing this campaign as an estimable effort to maintain this sacred form of discourse. This approach has implications for an ignored study of the rhetoric of scientific popularization in a cross‐cultural context.     

Climbing the academic ladder: A critique of provincialism in contemporary rhetoric

Finding its place in the Sun, rhetoric has been corrupted by its own unexpected success.     

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

This tropological analysis of “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's “dialectical” irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the context of eighteenth-century debates on female education and investigates how it can function in conjunction with romantic irony. Significantly, Murray deployed romantic irony in order to question her era's commonplace ideas about women's intellectual capacities and conventional female education. She then employed dialectical irony in order to sidestep relativism, playing off and departing from the expanded field of possibilities that romantic irony opened up. In so doing, she cast doubt upon commonly held doubts themselves, questioning the subversiveness normally associated with learned ladies. Through this series of ironic turns, readers were invited to change their previous beliefs and then presented with a clear means of moving forward—thereby opening a path for elite European American girls to be educated in traditionally masculine domains.     

Establishing the Rhetorical Presidency through Presidential Rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt and the Brownsville Raid

Theodore Roosevelt was an important figure in the development of the presidency as a primary and authoritative source for definitions of national identity. Through an analysis of three specific rhetorical moves Roosevelt made in arguments over the “proper” interpretation of the Brownsville Raid, this essay examines how Roosevelt both justified his dismissal of the soldiers and increased the definitional power of his institution. Brownsville highlights the importance of the presidency's constitutive and rhetorical power, especially as that power pertains to ideologically based definitions of national identity and the role of minorities within that identity, and illuminates the argumentative forms that undergird that constitutive power.     

A Vernacular Republican Rhetoric: William Manning's Key of Libberty

Our analysis of farmer and tavern-keeper William Manning's 1798 Key of Libberty extends the concept of American republican rhetoric to include both elite and vernacular forms. We find that the key components of Manning's vernacular republicanism are: an aggressive use of the rhetoric of critique; the demand for transparency in public argument; the rejection of elite leadership; and the belief that decisions must be made in the interest of the common good. We compare vernacular to elite republicanism and conclude that the vernacular perspective has endured in American reform rhetoric.     

Negotiating Feminist Politics in the Third Wave: Labor Struggle and Solidarity in Live Nude Girls Unite!

This essay examines Live Nude Girls Unite!, a documentary about female exotic dancers' successful efforts to unionize. The film rhetorically exposes an alternative perspective on the ideological evolution, and contradictions, that represent third-wave feminism by complicating the notion of gender oppression and the responsibilities of coalition politics. Through these women's analyses of their political situation, the film rhetorically addresses complex issues, including the complicated distinctions between victimizer and victim in contemporary gender politics, women's appropriation of sex work and capacity for labor activism, and the dominant culture's attempts to regulate working women's private and public lives.     

Triumph in Defeat: The Genre of Third Party Presidential Concessions

I argue through analysis of the genre of concession speeches that third party presidential candidates have rhetorical norms of their own that address their unique challenges as political outsiders. I contend that their concessions are a variant of the concession genre warranted by the recurring situational barriers and overall purposes for minor party presidential campaigns. In developing this argument, I describe the function and form of traditional concessions, offer an alternative theory based on the analysis of over 30 such statements by various third party nominees from 1948 to 2008, and then provide three case studies demonstrating the genre.     

方法与史料的科学运筹──读宗廷虎、李金苓《中国修辞学通史·近现代卷》

宗廷虎、李金苓先生的《中国修辞学通史·近现代卷》是一本不可多得的学术著作,作为修辞学史论,它的价值超越了语言学的范畴。这部著作具有多方面的特色,史料与方法的科学运筹是其中最重要的特色。