Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 295 Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation. Edited by J. Michael Hogan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998; pp. xxxviii + 315. $39.95. Based on the fourth installment of the biennial public address conferences, this volume continues the pattern of preserving traditional rhetorical studies of significant texts, with an umbrella topic addressed by a select delegation of well-established scholars whose analyses then each receive an extended response. Michael Hogan's preface establishes the chosen topic of "community," citing lamentations upon its disappearance and seeking an alternative to what James Davison Hunter calls a "grammar of hostility" (xiv). Roderick P. Hart's introduction then posits a rise in the rhetoric of hate, amplified by the media and contemporary moral emptiness (although the contention about a significant increase in this phenomenon takes the form of rhetorical questions rather than a clear historical argument). The body of the volume divides into three parts. The first, "Race, Gender, and Community," begins with Michael Osborn's investigation of the metaphors used by early feminist orators in order to bring diversity to his research program. Asserting that the speakers had an "intuitive" understanding of such forms (5, 15), Osborn's reading suggests, for example, a marvelously complex use of spatial metaphors as well as what he finds a troubling use of war metaphors. Respondent Martha Watson applauds this expansion while suggesting the constraints on asserting gendered characteristics based on a disparate group of texts devoted to one movement. She notes, for example, that not all feminists were pacifists, which places the use of war metaphors in a different light. The second case study in this section offers Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's analysis of the published debate over lynching between southerner Thomas Nelson Page and African American leader Mary Church Terrell. Kohrs Campbell sets the exchange within the context of the economics of turn-of-the-century print media that encouraged dehumanizing coverage of blacks while sharply restraining their rhetorical options. Thus Church Terrell cited white sources, challenged the lawlessness of lynch mobs, and suffered the inability to offer a scenario as compelling as that of the overblown "rape of the white virgin" (46). James Arnt Aune then encourages an expanded Marxist reading of the debate, including attention to the complicity of intellectuals, media, and mass audiences in the process. Completing this section, Stephen H. Browne assesses the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois's essay "Of the Wings of Atalanta," with its "stylized distortion of the city as the city is envisioned by dominant culture" (76). Browne suggests that Du Bois presents a view both a part of and apart from the new Atlanta for an African American by interweaving mythic narratives of the new south, the gospel of wealth, and Utopian Atlanta. James Darsey then offers a poignant interpretation of the same essay: Du Bois felt so estranged from each community that he ultimately found redemption only "above the Veil," in the intellectually idealized refuge of death. 296 Rhetoric & Public Affairs The second part, devoted to "War and Community," commences with Ronald H. Carpenter's delineation of how a speech by General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War convinced resistant military leaders of the wisdom of attacking at Inchon. Drawing from several different versions of the text, Carpenter contends that MacArthur employed an admixture of appeals to pride, expertise, and military objectives—and the exclusion of key contrary information. Martin J. Medhurst's reply places MacArthur's speech within the context of complex interpersonal, attitudinal , and situational dimensions, "equally rhetorical in nature" (146), that he asserts played as significant a role as the address—which Medhurst argues was more effective for its logos than for its ethos. In the second study of war, Celeste M. Condit and April M. Greer posit that Winston Churchill's "War Situation I" address of 1940 enacted a reciprocal relationship between leader and nation, as he "defined the battle and articulated the value of defending the democratic community against. . . facism" (168). They argue that Churchill was more than a mouthpiece as he conjoined British pride and common sense to reassure his audience in the wake of the fall of France, the commencement...