Civic Rhetoric Research Articles

Civic rhetoric and social inclusion

Abstract The subject of the study is current civic rhetoric with regard to the inclusive rhetorical mechanisms employed in it. In classical rhetoric, we rely on the Aristotle’s deliberative type of rhetoric. We are interested in the citizen’s predisposition for involvement in deliberation (deliberative competence including its rhetorical aspect), the identity of rhetorical deliberative subjects, as well as the rhetorical procedures and genres in civic rhetoric. We work on the assumption that inequality of deliberation actors is the impetus for the creation of inclusive rhetoric. In this paper we distinguish three functions of inclusive rhetoric: (1) coordination function (coordination of various individual or group interests, opinions, intentions), (2) compensatory function (compensating for knowledge, information and other deficits) and (3) solidarity function (strengthening collectivity as a prerequisite for the influence and success of proposals in the negotiation phase of civic rhetoric. These particular functions characterize inclusive rhetoric in the public debate phase of civic rhetoric (i.e., deliberation in its own sense). We characterize and illustrate them through the rhetorical speeches and deliberative practices of the founder of the civic initiative IG24.

Profanity from the heart as exceptional civic rhetoric

ABSTRACTDuring a televised ceremony celebrating the Boston Marathon bombing heroes, Red Sox star David Ortiz used profanity in his unscripted message of support for the city. The rhetorical significance of this incident lies not just with his language, but also the reactions to it. That many deemed Ortiz's profanity inoffensive—even appropriate—prompts a reconsideration of profanity's role in civic rhetoric. This essay examines the public engagements with Ortiz's language and argues for a reconsideration of appropriate rhetorical responses to extraordinary situations.

Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

“Religion and Nation Are One”: Social Identity Complexity and the Roots of Religious Intolerance in Turkish Nationalism

Turkish nationalism has long been an enigma for scholars interested in the formation of national identity. The nationalist movement that succeeded in crafting the Republic of Turkey relied upon rhetoric that defined the nation in explicitly secular, civic, and territorial terms. Though the earliest scholarship on Turkish nationalism supported this perspective, more recent research has pointed to Turkey's efforts to homogenize the new state as evidence of the importance of ethnicity, and particularly religion, in constructing Turkish national identity. Yet this marked mismatch between political rhetoric and politics on the ground is perplexing. If Turkey was meant to be a secular and civic state, why did Turkish nationalist policies place such a heavy emphasis on ethnic and religious purity? Moreover, why did religious identity become such a salient characteristic for determining membership in the national community and for defining national identity? This article draws upon historical research and social identity complexity theory to analyze this seeming dichotomy between religious and civic definitions of the Turkish nation. I argue that the subjective overlap between religious and civic ingroups during the late Ottoman Empire and efforts by nationalists to rally the populace through religious appeals explains the persistence of religious definitions of the nation despite the Turkish nationalist movement's civic rhetoric, and accounts for much of the Turkish state's religiously oriented policies and exclusionary practices toward religious minorities in its early decades.

Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece

Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece

Propaganda, Non-Rational Means, and Civic Rhetoric

This paper examines Jason Stanley’s account of propaganda. I begin with an overview and some questions about the structure of that account. I then argue for two main conclusions. First, I argue that Stanley’s account over-generalizes, by counting mere incompetent argumentation as propaganda. But this problem can be avoided, by emphasizing the role of emotions in effective propaganda more than Stanley does. In addition, I argue that more propaganda is democratically acceptable than Stanley allows. Focusing especially on sexual assault prevention campaigns, I show that propaganda can be acceptable even when it represents some in our communities as worthy of contempt.

Precis of How Propaganda Works

The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality. My aim was to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice. I do so by arguing that material inequality, like other forms of inequality, has pernicious epistemic effects. Inequality results in anti-democratic flawed ideologies, such as the ideology of meritocracy, and the ideology underlying the division of labor, the subjects of the last two chapters. Propaganda plays crucial roles both in preventing us from recognizing these epistemic harms, in the form of demagoguery, and in repairing them, in the form of civic rhetoric.

Propaganda, ideology, and democracy: A review of Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works

Propaganda, ideology, and democracy: A review of Jason Stanley, <i>How Propaganda Works</i>

Civic Rhetoric for the Social State: On Gerd van Istendael's Precarius

Civic Rhetoric for the Social State: On Gerd van Istendael's Precarius

The Voices of Counsel: Women and Civic Rhetoric in the Middle Ages

Women's rhetoric in the Middle Ages reflects their participation in the deliberative rhetorical genre inherited from classical antiquity. The deliberative tradition, which was often theorized by medieval rhetoricians as existing in consular practice, can thus serve as an example of women's rhetoric which, as Christine Mason Sutherland has noted, could take place in sermo. Women's letters were often hortatory, civic, and sometimes agonistic in tone. These rhetorical artifacts demonstrate that women operated in the rhetorical tradition as eloquent, powerful agents of persuasion in the civic arena, and they also show that, although unmoored from traditional spaces and practices associated with deliberation in antiquity, deliberative rhetoric was a more viable form of rhetoric in the Middle Ages than previously believed.

Civic Rhetoric—Meeting the Communal Interplay of the Provincial and the Cosmopolitan: Barack Obama's Notre Dame Speech, May 17, 2009

President Obama's commencement address on the University of Notre Dame campus evoked substantial controversy, providing public demonstration of rhetorical differences and demands generated by differing provincial and cosmopolitan positions. I contend that public civic rhetoric, in an era of narrative and virtue contention, must address the creative interplay of both provincial and cosmopolitan perspectives. In this essay I examine reactions to the Obama address from news sources connected with the local Catholic diocese, as well as the South Bend and University of Notre Dame newspapers. I argue that Obama's address is an example of a public civic speech that openly engaged the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan understandings of a controversial communal common center. Obama's Notre Dame speech framed discourse that walks within a world of tension and difference on the public stage, highlighting the communal rhetorical constitution of a speech moment shaped through the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan commitments.

Civic Rhetoric-Meeting the Communal Interplay of the Provincial and the Cosmopolitan: Barack Obama’s Notre Dame Speech, May 17, 2009

Abstract President Obama’s commencement address on the University of Notre Dame campus evoked substantial controversy, providing public demonstration of rhetorical differences and demands generated by differing provincial and cosmopolitan positions. Icontend that public civic rhetoric, in an era of narrative and virtue contention, must address the creative interplay of both provincial and cosmopolitan perspectives. In this essay I examine reactions to the Obama address from news sources connected with the local Catholic diocese, as well as the South Bend and University of Notre Dame newspapers. I argue that Obamas address is an example of a public civic speech that openly engaged the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan understandings of a controversial communal common center. Obamas Notre Dame speech framed discourse that walks within a world of tension and difference on the public stage, highlighting the communal rhetorical constitution of a speech moment shaped through the interplay of provincial and cosmopolitan commitments.

Art, Public Authorship and the Possibility of Re-Democratization

The subject of this article is a large public art project by German artist Jochen Gerz, which was part of the urban regeneration programme, the Phoenix Initiative, in Coventry City, 1999–2004. The study presents a short historical backdrop to Gerz's work by way of defining ‘public authorship’ of which the Coventry project is one example. It extends the literature on contemporary counter-monuments by assessing Gerz's artistic strategy in using a monument to exploring the conditions of public culture and the possible shape of a cultural public sphere in the contemporary city. The public art project lasted over five years and was a mechanism by which the political issues at stake in the public life of Coventry, particularly the socio-historic conflicts that are constitutive of its civic identity, were articulated. The study argues that public authorship succeeded in identifying some crucial coordinates in the political constitution of public culture in Coventry but, in the face of competing civic rhetoric and new urban policy initiatives, the project remains an open inquiry. This article concludes by identifying some critical lines of inquiry for future studies in art's critical role in the public sphere.

Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 Gregory Hays Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, eds. Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 972. £95.00; $175.00. The student who approaches the history of literary theory from existing sourcebooks could be excused for seeing the Middle Ages as dark. To take only one example, the latest (2005) edition of Hazzard Adams and Leroy Searle's Critical Theory since Plato finds space for Strabo and Plotinus among the ancients and Ludovico Castelvetro among the moderns, but includes no author between Boethius in the sixth century and Aquinas in the thirteenth. This willful erasure of seven centuries of thought seems to require explanation. In part, surely, it betrays the persistence of a Renaissance view of intellectual history, in which after a thousand years of arid scholasticism the insights of Horace and Pseudo-Longinus were revivified by Boccaccio and Sidney. But it probably also reflects the recalcitrant nature of the medieval material. Foundational authors like Servius, Priscian, and Isidore deal with the minutiae of Latin etymology and semantics. Reading them in English is a bit like reading a French version of Fowler's Modern English Usage or Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Much medieval theory is embedded in commentaries and glosses, often anonymous and hard to date. Many of these still lack a [End Page 314] reliable modern edition. So do some important freestanding texts like Alexander Neckam's Corrogationes Promethei. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter have set out to do something about this. What they offer us is a massive sourcebook focused on grammar and rhetoric, which they refer to collectively as “language arts.” This is not a medieval term, at least in this sense. (Artes sermocinales typically designates the trivium as a whole, not just these two members of it.) But its vagueness is useful here. It embraces something that is not quite literary criticism, not quite (or not solely) poetics. It overlaps linguistics without being coextensive with it. It embraces both the interpretation of existing texts and the generation of new ones. It is instantiated in the educational curriculum but not confined to it. One thing it notably does not include, for Copeland and Sluiter, is logic or dialectic. There is some justification for this. Dialectic does seem to have been subsidiary to the other two legs of the trivium, at least in the early Middle Ages. The editors have excluded on principle the speculative “modist” grammar of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which draws heavily on logic but which they regard as belonging rather to the history of philosophy. Even so, there is a sense at times that one is reading the liberal arts equivalent of The Two Musketeers. The readings are divided into various sections: early medieval approaches (late antique grammarians through Alcuin); twelfth-century speculation (John of Salisbury, Alan of Lille, and the like); the handbooks and poetic artes of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and others); new thirteenth-century developments (scholasticism, civic rhetoric, and dictamen). Each section is preceded, like the individual selections, by an able and lucid introduction. A final section on “reception” focuses primarily on English texts, including selections from Lydgate, Gower, the general prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, and a Middle English text on the liberal arts based on Grosseteste. The diachronic sequence is varied by “dossiers” on two sample topics: etymology and the ablative absolute. To their credit, the editors have not confined themselves to prefaces or other programmatic passages. They give us a real sense of what it is like to read Priscian or Servius in extenso. Given the size of the volume and the range of texts represented, a few omissions are noteworthy. Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana is absent because easily available elsewhere (though some of it is paraphrased in the prologue to the Wycliffite Bible). Room might have been found for Fulgentius's short [End Page 315] but influential interpretation of the nine muses as sequential stages of literary composition (Mitologiae 1.15). Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon...

Towards a ‘Civic’ Narrative: British National Identity and the Transformation of the British National Party

This article examines the ways in which the BNP utilises the elements of British national identity in its discourse and argues that, during Griffin's leadership, the party has made a discursive choice to shift the emphasis from an ethnic to a civic narrative. We put forward two hypotheses, 1: the modernisation of the discourse of extreme right parties in the British context is likely to be related to the adoption of a predominantly civic narrative and 2: in the context of British party competition the BNP is likely to converge towards UKIP, drawing upon elements of its perceived winning formula, i.e. a predominantly civic rhetoric of national identity. We proceed to empirically test our hypotheses by conducting a twofold comparison. First, we compare the BNP's discourse pre‐ and post‐1999 showing the BNP's progressive adoption of a civic narrative; and second the BNP's post‐1999 discourse to that of UKIP in order to illustrate their similarities in terms of civic values.

Remembering Doomsday: memoria in late medieval English drama and iconography*

Much critical attention has been devoted in recent years to the analysis of the medieval artes memorativae. The concern with the arts of memory, as exemplified by the recently collected translation...

Seeking Inclusion and Civil Rights through the Creation of a Civic Identity and Everyday Rhetoric

Seeking Inclusion and Civil Rights through the Creation of a Civic Identity and Everyday Rhetoric

Blair's Ideal Orator: Civic Rhetoric and Christian Politeness in Lectures 25-34

In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Hugh Blair works within the tradition of Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian in presenting rhetoric as a school subject that forms character and educates in citizenship. But by the terms of his title, “Rhetoric” and “Belles Lettres,” Blair signals a commitment to two different ideals of character—the ideal of civic republicanism of Roman rhetoric, on the one hand, and that of a middleclass, polite culture, on the other. As Blair wrestles with the tensions inherent in his program to reconcile the two in lectures 25–34, he inadvertently dramatizes the transformation from a rhetorical culture to a modern, bourgeois one.

Blair’s Ideal Orator: Civic Rhetoric and Christian Politeness in Lectures 25–34

Blair’s Ideal Orator: Civic Rhetoric and Christian Politeness in Lectures 25–34

Toward a Civic Rhetoric for Technologically and Scientifically Complex Places: Invention, Performance, and Participation

The spaces in which public deliberation most often takes place are institutionally, technologically, and scientifically complex. In this article, we argue that in order to participate, citizens must be able to invent valued knowledge. This invention requires using complex information technologies to access, assemble, and analyze information in order to produce the professional and technical performances expected in contemporary civic forums. We argue for a civic rhetoric that expands to research the complicated nature of interface technologies, the inventional practices of citizens as they use these technologies, and the pedagogical approaches to encourage the type of collaborative and coordinated work these invention strategies require.