Internal Rhetoric Research Articles

Selbstunterredungskunst

Abstract The essay highlights the fundamental importance of internal rhetoric in philosophical romanticism. First, it exposes Schelling’s general thesis that the art of inner conversation (‚innere Unterredungskunst‘) is the archetype of philosophical thinking. Furthermore, Shaftesbury’s background theory in his Soliloquy or, Advice to an Author is discussed, which characterizes the Art of soliloquy by the five basic operations of self-seperation, self-reflection, self-division, self-verbalisation, self-dialogization. Finally – returning to homo rhetorico-philosophicus Schelling – his romantic philosophy of the Ages of the World (Weltalter) is interpreted as a product of his internal rhetoric. Schelling’s philosophical Art of inner conversation combines here the invention of speculative history with the empowerment and self-invention of his author.

Forensic rhetoric: COVID-19, the forum and the boundaries of healthcare evidence

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the shifting role of healthcare evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations as a phenomenon indicating...

Otho’s duo facinora (Tacitus, Hist. 2.50.1): Conflict, Congruence, Exemplarity

Otho’s brief career in the Histories is framed by two symmetrical facinora, criminal coup and heroic suicide (1.21–22 and 2.47). Internal cross-references correlate these key moments, as commentators note, but formal-thematic continuity coexists with conspicuous psychological discontinuity. Where previous work has concentrated on the suicide that partially rehabilitates Otho, I focus instead on the frictions – rhetorical, psychological and ideological – and the dynamic interrelationship between the two passages. Otho’s internal rhetoric at 1.21–22, in counterpoint to the final public speech, offers a psychogram of ruthless ambition and obsession with exemplarity. His theatrical exit, typologically a literary Sterbeszene, enacts that obsession without erasing the treasonable past. Within the fray, Otho self-consciously styles himself as heroic exemplum; above the fray, the discordant aspects evidence Tacitus’ method of highlighting paradigmatic acts to memorialize or indict; and the paradoxical coniunctio oppositorum also captures the competing and distorting propaganda currents in civil war.

THE INEVITABILITY OF DIGITAL PUBLIC SPACE HETEROREGULATION: FRAMING THE PORTUGUESE

The expectations and behaviors transferred to digital environments harbor broader structures and historical processes that predate the establishment of digital culture itself. For this reason, the actions of individuals in the digital arena represent different forms of technology appropriation. Digital platforms are now recognized as utopian because they amplify new censorious mechanisms. On the one hand, hate speech and various forms of violence shape a new media system; on the other hand, they allow individuals and groups to attempt to condition and silence digital public spaces, especially the female universe. Journalistic activity has always been recognized as an ethical and deontological duty to combat censorship. Based on semi-structured indepth interviews with 31 Portuguese women journalists, this research aims to identify the follow-up of Portuguese media to the successive decadent transformations of digital culture. Using the descriptive approach of thematic analysis, the results expose the inoperability of self-regulation of media and journalists. The bias of traditional values of denunciation is developed in internal rhetoric of violence normalization suffered by journalists, the subsequent disregard of audience participation and the practice of some censorship practices in journalistic contents. This scenario has potentiated the invasive temptations of heteroregulation by the political power, delegating to a public institution the competences for determining which digital contents are worthy of “sanctioning regimes”.

Temple Destruction, Mourning and Curse in Elephantine, with a View to Lamentations

AbstractThe article discusses the lament over the Temple of YHW in Elephantine from three angles: from the perspective of the internal rhetoric or composition of the letter, from the perspective of the world of the Judaeans who wrote the petition, and from the perspective of the world of the intended recipient of the letter. In addition, the article explores how the mention of collective mourning and curse in the petition letter from Elephantine may provide a text of comparison – and context – for the laments over the destruction of the city of Zion and her temple found in the Book of Lamentations.

A balanced approach: Brexit from political and business perspectives

Abstract There is a considerable amount of publications written on rolling back the EU supra state, national sovereignty regain, and strategic (mis)conceptions for analysing Brexit scenarios for both the UK and the EU. Many articles present a unilateral point of view with a tendency to be normative. The presentation of only one-sided political, historical, and business perspectives can be very dangerous, limiting understanding and constructive approaches. This also happens with macro-economic analyses that are used fit for purpose. David Cameron’s political calculation to call for a referendum regarding the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union has had complex ramifications. With causes that have led to the British citizens’ decision that range from multiple crises in the European Union, member states’ inability for burden and risk sharing, to the lack of trust portrayed by European institutions and a confusing internal rhetoric. With a City of London remaining undecided and continuously evaluating the value at risk of Brexit, and in the absence of a new European financial center, it is important to make sense of the arguments of both in and out supporters. Thus, this article attempts to present a more integrated approach, spanning across politics, trade, private businesses and social attitudes. This paper looks beyond international relations between nations and takes into consideration the international relations between corporations and their business strategies.

Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis

We review energy communication, an emerging subfield of communication studies that examines the role of energy in society, and argue that it is dominated by a crisis frame. Whereas this frame can be productive, it can also be limiting. In response, we propose three areas for future energy communication research—internal rhetoric of science, comparative studies, and energy in everyday life—as starting points for rethinking and expanding energy communication. This expanded focus will continue to contribute to communication theory, add to interdisciplinary energy studies, and supply practical resources for the creation and deployment of just and sustainable energy futures.

Finding Good Places to Work and Live: Contemporary Contexts and Ways Forward

This special issue builds on foundational work to set an enlarged social agenda for external organizational rhetoric. After considering possible limits to the broadening of such rhetoric, it analyzes the redirection of scholarly attention, which is essentially concerned with the good organization’s potential to contribute to the good society. It notes how this has been, out of necessity, accompanied by a territorial extension of contextual, geographical, and temporal frames that expand the approaches of internal rhetoric and mainstream public relations.

Keats’s Voice

Keats’s Voice Magdalena Ostas (bio) Magdalena Ostas Boston University Magdalena Ostas Magdalena Ostas is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Boston University. She works in the areas of Romantic literature and culture as well as the history of literary, cultural, and aesthetic theory. Her current book project in progress, tentatively titled Romanticism and the Forms of Interiority, looks at the relationship between emergent pictures of subjectivity and selfhood in Romantic-era writing (Kant, Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, and others) and their relation to questions of literary form, aesthetics, and expression. Footnotes 1. On Romanticism and dispossession of the self, see Jacques Khalip’s Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009); on the Romantic self’s disappointment with itself, see Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999). 2. On Romanticism and the logic of the self's internalization, see Joshua Wilner, Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and on the Romantic critique of the self’s autonomy, see Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 3. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 361. 4. For a history-of-ideas account of conceptions of the self particularly relevant for Romantic literature and philosophy, see Charles Taylor’s magisterial Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and also Jerrold Seigel’s less successful and persuasive The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a genealogy of the notion of the self as a social form, see especially Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 5. See as representative, for example, Jonathan Culler’s passing remark in the introductory comments of his recent “Why Lyric?” (PMLA 123, no.1 [2008]) that Romantic poetics is marked by “the notion of lyric as expression of intense personal feeling” (201). 6. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 22. 7. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 9. 8. Letter to John Taylor, 17 November 1819, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:234. For a discussion of the debate between what Levinson calls the “gorgeous tapestry school” and the “metaphysical school” of interpretation, see Keats’s Life of Allegory, 97–104. As representative of the former, see especially Earl Wasserman, who claims that the poem is “a storehouse of narrative, descriptive, atmospheric, and prosodic techniques for building a poetic dream-world” (The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953], 100); Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), who argues that the poem’s Spenserian stanzas result in “pictorial units” (438) that “tempt poetic narrative toward tableau” (441); and Grant Scott, who proposes “we read the poem as a painting” (The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994], 89). 9. Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 74. 10. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), lines 1–9. Subsequent references to Keats’s poems are quoted by lines from this edition. 11. Bate, John Keats, 448. 12. In her reading of St. Agnes, Elizabeth Fay similarly maintains that “it is the work in which [Keats] uses medievalism to overturn rather than enable romance” and that he is “not merely replicating a medieval poetic aesthetic” (Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal [Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002], 127, 135). More broadly, Fay argues that Keats’s use of medieval genre figures and conventions recuperates and revives a troubadourian tradition and ethos that aligns him with an un-nostalgic “radical medievalism” (3...

Hallucinogesis: Thomas De Quincey’s Mind Trips

Hallucinogesis: Thomas De Quincey’s Mind Trips Elizabeth Fay (bio) Elizabeth Fay University of Massachusetts Boston Elizabeth Fay Elizabeth Fay’s most recent publication is Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (UP of New England, 2010). Her other publications include Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Palgrave, 2002), A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Blackwell, 1998), and Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (U of Massachusetts P, 1995). Her current project is on Romantic Egyptology. Footnotes 1. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 67. All references to the 1821 Confessions, “Suspiria de Protundis,” and “The English Mail-Coach” will be from this edition. All other references are to David Masson’s edition, Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols (Edinburgh: Black, 1897). 2. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 48. De Quincey’s Gothicized imagination reveals itself throughout his autobiographical writings, and he wrote a Gothic novel as well, Klosterheim (1832). See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986). 3. Charles J. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995) 10. 4. Alina Clej, A Genealogy of The Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford: Stanford UP, 199) 8. 5. Joshua Wilner, “Autobiography and Addiction: The Case of De Quincey,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 14.4 (Winter 1981): 493–503; Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000) 70–75. 6. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991). 7. Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995). 8. Frederick Burwick reads this economic parallel as one of mental rather than bodily economy in relation to political economy. See Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (New York: Palgrave, 2001). I take seriously De Quincey’s reference to his physical economy, however: “The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of my physical economy, was from the re-awakening of a state of eye generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability” (Confessions 67). 9. See John Barrell’s analysis of self-innoculation as a centering metaphor in De Quincey’s writings (Infection of Thomas De Quincey 15–18). 10. Confessions 5n; this was Hazlitt’s failing, De Quincey informs us: Hazlitt is “an acute thinker” rather than “a subtle one” because “he has not read Plato in his youth (which most likely was only his misfortune); but neither has he read Kant in his manhood (which is his fault).” 11. Burwick complicates this critique, claiming that for De Quincey the sublime must be co-present with reason and imagination (Thomas De Quincey 86). Although Burwick describes the De Quinceyan aesthetic experience, the co-presence of mental faculties applies to the properties of hallucinogesis, with its combinatory mental powers. 12. Barrell, for instance, follows this line of thought when he reads the later revised Malay passage (Masson 3: 402–6) as one in which the Malay is associated with another seaman, the murderous John Williams of “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” a figure De Quincey Orientalizes. By “stoning” the Malay, Williams–through a complex of various other Williams populating De Quincey’s life and texts–the destructive other is ritually defeated (74–76). 13. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) for his discussion of hybridity as that which usefully challenges cultural constructions of identity. 14. See Charles J. Rzepka’s Sacramental Commodities. 15. Tilottama Rajan is behind much of my formulation of a De Quinceyan hermeneutic. See Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980). 16. The essay is a review of Janies Gillman’s biography of Coleridge, his patient and house companion for Coleridge’s final 19 years of life. De Quincey’s essay was first published in 1845, revised in 1859. 17. Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski, Immanuel...

The Real Revolution in Political Science

past of the discipline has been imaged--or imagined. Gabriel Almond's Orwellian dictum that whoever controls the interpretation of the past in our professional history writing has gone a long way toward controlling the future (1988, 835) may be a bit over the top, but telling the story of political science has always been a crucial element in both the discipline's internal rhetoric of inquiry and its search for identity. And it has been tempting to apply Thomas Kuhn's imagery regarding scientific revolutions (1970 [1962]) to an interpretation of the history of the field and to a description of the conduct of inquiry. During the 1960s, APSA presidential addresses by David Truman

Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self-Persuasion (review)

Nienkamp's work is one of the most important contributions to rhetorical theory of the last several years. The history of self-persuasion that Nienkamp expertly and persuasively draws builds toward her theoretical construct, the "rhetorical self," which "is made up of a colloquy of internalized social languages" (127), "voices" (128), or "cultural imperatives" (135). The rhetorical self practices internal rhetoric to "maintain a fragile equilibrium of personal identity and to resolve ambiguous or conflicting imperatives for attitude, decision, and action" (128).

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization by Joshua Wilner (review)

938 Reviews of the accounts of the operation of censorship are intriguing. Cumberland's Richard theSecond (1792), a dramatization ofthe Tyler/Straw tax revolt, was (unsurprisingly) rejected by the censor, despite its law-and-order, pro-monarchical conclusion. The revised version, TheArmourer, was allowed, although the plot turns upon the attempt of the Earl of Suffolk to rape a blacksmith's daughter (which provokes a riot). This is a nice and, arguably, intelligentdiscrimination. However, the contingent argument has to yield to an approach by alienation and metaphor because the London stage 'bore little relation to the realities of the age' (p. 206). Yet this is symptomatic of 'cultural alienation' (p. 206), and the contempo? rary signification can be reconstituted by metaphorical interpretation. Thus: Scene, a dungeon in Ruritania. Bianco, the good brother, is in chains. Enter Nerone, the bad brother, sword in hand who desires to kill Bianco for his estate. Castizia, Bianco's wife, interposes herself and cries, 'Kill me, but save my husband!' Nerone repents; the brothers are reconciled; everyone lives happily ever after.Accordingly, in Castizia we may perceive the displaced presence of Wollstonecraftian feminism; Nerone represents the confusing image of the villain/hero Napoleon; Bianco's chains referboth to the Bastilles of the ancien regime and to the fate of the emigres. The sword thrust towards Castizia is the metaphoric correlative of bourgeois, patriarchal marriage as a form of rape. This is an invented (and absurdly concentrated) example, but parallels Taylor's use, in extended analysis, ofthe Malfiesque horrors of Lewis's The Captive as a 'realistic' image of woman's 'oppression' (p. 115); or Master Betty's ideological functions as a 'metaphorical critique' of Napoleon (p. 155), and, in general, the interpretation of the Gothic dungeon, which 'could reflect both the instinctive fear of the conservative and the dashed hopes of the radical' (p. 199). In this way the ephemera of culture become the means of explication of the hidden ideological struc? tures of society. Yet there is surely a substantive difference between an examination of the alterations made to a text by censorship (historical scholarship) and a meta? phorical process which rejects evidence either of authorial intention or of audience interpretation (if this exists) and substitutes contingent associationism. Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization. By Joshua Wilner. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. xvi+ 154 pp. ?27. 'Readings', in the subtitle of Feeding on Infinity, aptly describes the book, for two reasons. First, it consists of separate essays unified not so much by a central thesis as by a common focus, on a broad concept called 'internalization'. Second, the method used is close explication of short passages, from works by a variety of authors, that are intended to bring out the points of the respective chapters. 'Internalization' is to be understood in a variety of ways, literal (as in the ingestion of food, alcohol, and drugs) or more figurative. Wilner brings to bear the notion of internalization on such matters as authorial confessional writing, in several historical periods; the way in which a guilty conscience is created; the significance of the mutation of religious frames of mind into secular ones; gender issues as reflected in the prestige of verse compared with prose or of the lyric poem compared with the novel; the nature of poetic inspiration; and the relevance to such inspiration of various forms of actual or metaphorical inebriation. Unsurprisingly, Wilner argues that Romanticism had a uniquely important historical role in evolving the various meanings and strategies of internalization (a conventional enough view). Freud's ideas, and, less often, those of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Melanie Klein, are often invoked for their supposed explanatory power. MLR, 97.4, 2002 939 The authors through whom these issues are explored include Montaigne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Byron, and (testifying to the persistence today of Romantic motifs of internalization) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Wilner's concrete explication of these authors' works?especially of Wordsworth's Prelude, Excursion, and 'Nutting' and of Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris? are usually perspicacious, convincing, and often genuinely exciting. On the other hand, the context...

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Internal rhetorics: toward a history and theory of self-persuasion

Since its early history in Greek culture, traditional rhetorical study has focused primarily on persuasive language used in public sphere. There has been little study, however, of what Jean Nienkamp calls internal rhetoric, which occurs between one aspect of self and another inside one's mind. Nienkamp opens study of internal by discussing how concept developed alongside traditional classical and modern rhetorical theory. Nienkamp shows how we talk to ourselves, or more specifically, how we talk ourselves into things: justifications, actions, opinions, theories. She explains that just because we see ourselves as divided, as torn in different directions by conflicting desires, duties, and social mores, it does not mean that we are split into discrete identities that neither interrelate nor interact. In this groundbreaking study, Nienkamp identifies two major aspects of internal rhetoric: the conscious 'art' of cultivated internal rhetoric and the unconscious 'nature' of primary internal rhetoric. Selecting a small number of figures from history of - including Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Lord Shaftesbury, Richard Whately, Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, George Herbert Mead, and Lev Vygotsky - Nienkamp argues for a version of rhetorical self that takes into account both ways we are formed by and formulate internal and external rhetorics and ways our physical bodies act as a contributing scene - an agora - for internal rhetoric.

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Book Review| March 01 2002 Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization. By Joshua Wilner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 154 p. David Collings David Collings Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2002) 54 (2): 193–195. https://doi.org/10.1215/-54-2-193 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Collings; Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization. Comparative Literature 1 March 2002; 54 (2): 193–195. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-54-2-193 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization (review)

Feeding on Infinity, Joshua Wilner's challenging and rewarding new book, comprises several related essays on "the problem of internalization as it finds expression in European Romantic literary tradition." Wilner argues that the discourse of "internalization," so familiar in literary studies, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and everyday use, has most often been applied inexactly to processes and concepts that "are not well grasped, if grasped at all." In close readings of largely canonical texts by Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and others, he sets out to perform a "labor of conceptual clarification" (1-2). [End Page 197]

Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Notions of play an important role in many contemporary fields of discourse, including literary history and theory, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and learning theory in the social sciences. Indeed, the term is pervasive and seems to answer a shared need of expression to such an extent that it is one of those technical words that has found its way into everyday use. In this text, Joshua Wilner explores the power and limits of the discourse of internalization through the close reading of a variety of texts drawn from the Romantic tradition, a tradition which is both source for and often object of this discourse. Through the study of writers including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin and Sedgwick, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the problem of internalization, while situating its more or less explicit emergence as a problem in relation to the history of, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, patriarchal poetics. Through attention to the transformations of rhetorical structures of representation and address performed by these works and to the frequent condensation of these transformations in figures of eating and drinking, the text makes available to inquiry a rich network of connections within the long Romantic tradition. At the same time, it forges new links between deconstructive reading practices, psychoanalysis and recent work in gender studies.

Feeding on infinity: readings in the Romantic rhetoric of internalization

Feeding on infinity: readings in the Romantic rhetoric of internalization