Rhetorical Process Research Articles

Conflit, consensus, dissensus dans deux lettres ouvertes : A Common Word between Us and You et “A Common Word” Christian Response

I will analyze in this article how discussants in two open letters, issued after Pope Benedict XVIth’s Regensburg lecture in 2006, seek to reach consensus and overcome disagreement in a particular conflict situation. I first show that “conflict” is a tricky and slippery word and that far from being always negatively connoted, it is, for some thinkers, indicative of the solidity and the genuine pluralistic nature of a society. I carry out a rhetorical analysis against this theoretical background, drawing mainly notions, such as kairos, identification, audience, ethos and presencing, from Kenneth Burke’s (1950/69a) and Chaïm Perelman’s (Perelman & Obrechts-Tyteca 1958/69) rhetorical theories. I explore how the writers of the two open letters endeavour to bridge up the gap between Muslims and Christians in a time of heightened tension and how they insist, through the rhetorical process of identification, on the consubstantiality of their religions and their stances towards the inter-faith dialogue. The two parties engage in an open dialogue the hallmark of which is a common eagerness to reach consensus and obliterate dissensus and they repeatedly make plain that their dialogue is conducted under the auspices of a transcendental and ethically motivated rationality. Yet, I show that this apparently rational and dispassionate consensus is only reached by excluding a “third” and by refusing to tackle or by minimizing the important dissensual issues.

Legitimization as a rhetorical process in a regulatory agency

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify how the US Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) communicatively engaged in legitimization concerning accreditation.Design/methodology/approachThis study utilized the rhetorical analysis approach outlined by Hoffman and Ford (2010) to explore the accreditation-related texts from an online source created by CHEA, Information About Accreditation.FindingsThe analysis identified three overarching approaches to include: isomorphism to address regulatory legitimacy, organizational identity management to address pragmatic legitimacy, and a dialogic approach to address normative legitimacy. This analysis also developed a new theoretical model for the rhetorical construction of legitimacy, “A Model for the Rhetorical Construction of Legitimacy,” that can be summarized as: organizations foster a type of legitimacy through a legitimizing strategy by demonstrating how the purpose of the legitimizing strategy is achieved by the implementation of the legitimizing strategy.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations include that data were gathered only from online, web-based texts during a period in which the rhetorical situation was ongoing.Practical implicationsThis study expands research concerning the rhetorical approach to issues management in that it examines the way legitimacy is negotiated through the various rhetorical strategies of an organization. Additionally, information is offered about the rhetorical structure of texts when an organization seeks to legitimize certain ideas.Originality/valueThis analysis developed a theoretical model for the rhetorical construction of legitimacy, “A Model for the Rhetorical Construction of Legitimacy,” that demonstrates important relationships between legitimizing strategies and types of legitimacy. Understanding these relationships may allow for a better interpretation of how legitimacy theory is represented within a communicative venture.

“Judging a book by its cover”: meditation, memory, and invention in seventeenth-century Ukrainian title pages

ABSTRACTThis article concerns the use of visual paratexts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, and of illustrated title pages in particular. The books under analysis represent three crucial monuments of seventeenth-century Ukrainian sacred oratory. These are: Lazar Baranovych’s Truby sloves propovidnykh na narochityia dni prazdnikov (Kyiv, 1674), and Antonii Radyvylovs'kyi’s Ohorodok Marii Bohorodytsy (Kyiv, 1676) and his Vinets Khrystov z propovidii nedelnykh (Kyiv, 1688). The author concentrates on the “cognitive” aspect of their titular pages, dealing with them as a rhetorical process that emphasizes meditation, invention, and memory. More specifically, she investigates the correlation between the visual and the written as a specific literary-figurative “mode of thought” that stands in a long Christian tradition of expounding images as meditational tools. She shows how Baranovych and Radyvylovs'kyi interact with this tradition, arguing that their title pages provide readers-viewers with both a machina meditativa, a meditative apparatus for reflecting upon the mystery of the Incarnation, and a machina rhetorica, a repertory of images that the users of the books, often themselves preachers, could use to compose new texts.

Civic Jazz

Civic Jazz

Affects in Configuration: A New Approach to Narrative Worldmaking

In this essay, I propose a new model and methodology for investigating the productive, layered ways in which affects operate in and through narrative texts in the communicative loops of reading and writing. I delineate this model by way of a dialogue between different concepts of worlding, world-building, and worldmaking circulating in narrative and affect theory, which provide connecting points between the two fields as well as diverging (Deleuzian, neuroscientific, phenomenological) approaches to affect. In developing these connecting points, the proposed syncretic model addresses the shortcomings of current uses of affect, including the foreclosure of textuality and subjectivity in Deleuzian conceptualizations and the narrow emotion concepts and generalizing tendencies of neuroscientific approaches. In reconceptualizing narrative worldmaking as a multidimensional, ‘multivectoral’ assemblage of heterogeneous elements, I detail how the rhetorical processes of narration and reading engage affects, bodily memories, and associations in layered transactions between characters, narrators, implied and actual readers and authors. Probing the model’s productivity through a reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I spell out three sets of implications for narrative theory: I consider fictionality’s affective engagement in the world, the workings of distributed, nonsovereign agency in the loop of literary communication, and the potentials of reconfigurative reading as a methodology of ‘following’ affective complexity.

Reading literature rhetorically in education: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Prison-Door’ as an exercise in close reading

Despite the many historical links between literature and rhetoric, teachers of literature have made relatively few attempts to draw on rhetoric for teaching purposes. The present article suggests how this may be done, and argues for the pedagogical benefits of taking a rhetorical approach to literature. By means of a close reading of the first chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I demonstrate how a text may be systematically explored through the five steps (partes) of the classical rhetorical process. In conclusion, it suggests that rhetoric may be a means to bridge the gap between the many facets of English as a second language subject, as rhetoric provides a holistic framework allowing us to study literature and culture as language, and vice versa.

“Tonal Strategies and Rhetorical Processes in John Dowland’s Lutesongs: Two Case Studies.”

Cultivating Instincts in Our Musical Theater Students with Spectral Pedagogy Elizabeth Gerbi Abstract Many competitive musical theatre training programs prioritize the professional carry-over value of their teachings, and consider the immediate application of audition-ready singing, movement, and acting skills paramount. Accordingly, instructors on these faculties feel that they best serve students by indoctrinating them to the commercial realities of the industry (such as vocal and physical typing), although these directives may ultimately discourage or prevent the very sort of vocal and dramatic experimentation that ultimately allows actors to construct dynamic, layered, authentic characters. This unintended consequence may actually be worse for students who enter conservatory environments with considerable prior training, and thus have learned to perform by following the directives of teachers and coaches, mitigating their ability to make emboldened voice and character choices. This article examines the role of the voice educator in creating safe environments for experimentation, and the application of “spectral pedagogy” towards the critical deconstruction of peer performances. In addition, I provide practical guidelines to assist instructors in establishing a “workshop” dynamic in their classroom distinct from a “performance” space, which simultaneously contributes to the long-range benefit of student performers while permitting instructors much-needed latitude in their own professional development. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijmpa.v4n1a1

De la séduction textile à la séduction textuelle dans Le Paysan parvenu et La Vie de Marianne de Marivaux

L’article évalue d’abord l’importance du textile dans le devenir des deux héros, Jacob et Marianne, et examine le pouvoir de séduction que leur offrent leurs nouveaux habits, sur eux-mêmes ou sur autrui. Une fois devenus narrateurs, c’est par l’écriture qu’ils tentent de créer une connivence avec leurs destinataires et de les influencer en leur faveur, en ornant, tissant ou brodant le canevas de leur existence. L’article analyse donc les principaux procédés rhétoriques utilisés par les deux narrateurs pour séduire le lecteur : l’affirmation de la spontanéité de l’écriture, le tissage du lien avec la narrataire, l’appel à l’émotion, l’autojustification, la mise en valeur de soi, la réécriture romanesque du passé, l’humour et l’autodérision.

Chaucer's Boece and Rhetorical Process in the Wife of Bath's Bedside Questio

Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale has been well-mined for feminist and psychological issues but less criticism has analyzed the rhetorical techniques informing the wyf's bedside harangue to the knight. These are shown to echo that of Lady Philosophy to Boethius in Chaucer's Boece; close reading of the lecture reveals a patterning on Boece, particularly evinced in the similarities between Lady Philosophy and the foul wife, in the matches in argumentation and rhetorical devices, and in the harangue's emphasis on power and obedience. Whether meant seriously or to humorously imitate scholastic debate, the foul wife's questio suggests new questions about Chaucer's intentions and purposes in the tale. 6633 words.

Crane's Speech Figures and the Making of Whilomville's Monster

Odd phrases—certain vaguely humorous idiomatic figures of speech—are far too instrumental in the narrative development of Crane's fiction to be considered incidental, though their precise role remains obscure. At times, particular phrases and figures even seem to exert a surreal or supernatural agency over Crane's fictional terrain. Accounting for these in terms of fairly conventional modes of realism and naturalism, critics often presume that Crane's plotting works to literalize clichés of common speech and thus to reveal, in a manner of action, social significance latent in a manner of speaking. I argue, however, that rather than using narrative to literalize figurative phrases, ironically displaying hidden social mechanisms, Crane's fiction is directly concerned with the processes by which such phrases are themselves born and naturalized in narration. These rhetorical processes counterpose conventional modes of novelistic figuration against the historical and social developments of actual speech figures. Alongside brief discussions of The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Crane's shorter fiction, this essay traces in detail the figurative process of The Monster (1898). Published just at the historical moment when the phrase losing face was entering common usage in English, The Monster confronts the invention and spread of this figure (and others) in novelistic terms, as a post-Reconstruction small-town tragedy. Ultimately, the processes by which phrases are made and come to preside destructively over more familiar narrative patterns suggest an irresolvable formal conflict in Crane's literary naturalism, with broader implications for the relationship between narrative and rhetoric in the novel form.

Startling Starts: Smart Contact Lenses and Technogenesis

Startling Starts: Smart Contact Lenses and Technogenesis

Chaucer’s Boece and Rhetorical Process in the Wife of Bath’s Bedside Questio

Chaucer’s Boece and Rhetorical Process in the Wife of Bath’s Bedside Questio

The Letterbooks of John Evelyn ed. by Douglas D.C. Chambers and David Galbraith (review)

Douglas D.C. Chambers and David Galbraith, eds. The Letterbooks of John Evelyn. Two volumes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 1328 pp. $195. John Evelyn had all the qualifications to be a virtuoso, being a rich gentleman, with a powerful and enquiring mind, who enjoyed the social life of Restoration London. It was as a virtuoso and public servant that his peers knew him: they read his books and pamphlets on tree-planting, gardening, engraving, the study of commemorative medals, and the smoke of London and met him on committees, at dinner parties, and at the Royal Society. In the nineteenth century, the diary that he kept from his youth in the 1630s to his death in 1706 was rediscovered and published. It is not as vivid and personal as the diary that his friend Samuel Pepys kept in the 1660s, but it is an impressive sustained self-portrait and a major historical resource. The definitive edition of Evelyn's diary appeared in 1955 in six volumes, edited by the independent scholar Esmond de Beer, with a learned commentary and a stupendous index. The British Library includes two large volumes into which he copied a selection of his outgoing correspondence, comprising 810 letters written between 1644 and 1698. Like the diary, these letter books were compiled toward the end of Evelyn's life as a self-portrait for posterity. They are the subject of the edition under review here. This edition has its origins in a plan to edit the whole of Evelyn's correspondence, formed by Douglas Chambers more than twenty years ago. The result of this plan would have been comparable to great modern editions such as those of the correspondence of John Locke (by Esmond de Beer again, 3648 letters in eight volumes, 1976 to 1989) and of Robert Boyle (by Michael Hunter and others, over two thousand letters in six volumes, 2001). Chambers soon decided that an edition of the letter books would be more practicable than one of the entire correspondence of Evelyn. This was very reasonable decision: Evelyn's own selection of the letters by which he wanted to be represented does call for treatment as a work in itself. He worked on this project until 2004. Ill health then forced him to suspend work; some of his project materials were lost in a fire, but enough essential materials were preserved for his Toronto colleague David Galbraith to take the project up in 2008 and to complete it. The first thing to say about this edition is that it makes a very large, and very important, primary text available for the first time. (Selected letters of Evelyn's were published in nineteenth-century editions of his diary, and his correspondence with Pepys was edited by Guy de la Bedoyere in 1997, but most of the letters published here are new, and they have never before been presented as the unit which Evelyn intended them to be.) Its publication is a landmark in our understanding of Evelyn and of his context. The diary only told half the story of Evelyn and his interests, and the letters naturally tell much more, because a diary presents its writer to some extent in isolation and letters present the writer in connection with other people. So, we see Evelyn in action as a virtuoso, learning, arguing, and advising: the introduction notes well that the natural philosopher John Beale, to whom Evelyn wrote a number of important letters, is not mentioned in the diary (xxxii). We see him as a social networker, engaged in the intricate lifelong rhetorical process of cultivating and exploiting relationships with powerful men and women. We see him as a man of feeling avant la lettre: the diary is a source for his spiritual love affair with Margaret Blagge, his consternation at her marriage to the politician Sidney Godolphin, and his intense grief after her death after childbirth, but this story is only completed by reading Evelyn's long series of letters to Sidney Godolphin, one on every anniversary of Margaret's death, quoting again and again from a letter which Sidney had written early in his bereavement. …

Voluntary Martyrdom and Gnosticism

Building on the recent surge of interest in early Christian martyrdom, especially with regard to voluntary martyrdom and social rhetorical processes, this article challenges the traditional view that Gnostics opposed martyrdom. A close analysis of the primary texts results in a more nuanced presentation of martyrdom in the late second and third centuries. While some early Christians may indeed have opposed martyrdom, it is far too simplistic to make such totalizing claims about Gnostic Christianity. This article argues that the debates over volunteerism are embedded within the rhetorical discourse of these texts.

Sea-Level Rise Policy as Attention Intervention

This study examines the rhetorical process by which the state of North Carolina shifted from leading in sea-level rise planning to legislating policy inaction. Through the lens of the Rhetoric of Social Intervention model, it highlights how stakeholders attempted to promote and impede attention shifts to alternative templates for achieving social system prosperity. The essay's symbol-system view clarifies a vicious circle discourse cycle and points to the media's potential role in reversing it. The study recommends revisions to the policy supporters’ interventions to promote the limiting-human-activity policy template, identifies discourse cycles that have hindered policy action, suggests ways to impede polarizing cycles, and demonstrates the interventional nature of social change.

Sin vs. science? Rethinking venereal disease in turn-of-the-century America.

In their analyses of the country’s struggles with sexually transmitted disease, historians of the modern United States often draw a distinction between those who have advocated a “moral” approach to maladies such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV/AIDS, and those who have aimed to combat these conditions along strictly “medical” lines. While capturing a crucial tension in the era’s venereal debates, when viewed from the perspective of Hot Springs—a central Arkansas health resort known throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as the “Mecca of the American Syphilitic”—this “Sin vs. Science” framework appears as something of a false dichotomy. Focusing on the writings of this southern city’s medical professionals, this article examines the rhetorical processes through which a group of local venereal specialists constructed a new narrative of syphilis, one in which religious and scientific discourses surrounding syphilis overlapped and intersected with each other. An amalgamation of medicine and morality, the novel therapeutic imagery crafted by Hot Springs’ resident doctors was part and parcel of the broader venereological community’s professionalization project, as turn-of-the-century venereal specialists throughout the United States saw in their rhetorical efforts a means for achieving legitimacy and respectability vis-a-vis the American medical profession.

Private Manning and the Chamber of Secrets

Abstract This article explores news coverage from 2010–2013 of Chelsea (formerly known as Bradley) Manning’s disclosures of both state and gender secrets to discover how government actors, journalists, and social movement leaders disciplined emergent truths in two modalities. The first modality is juridical, involving Manning’s trial and reporting that focuses attention exclusively on Manning’s crime against the state; the second is biopolitical, disciplining Manning by discrediting her body and voice as troubled, confused, damaged, weak, irrational, and pathological. That Manning’s disclosures resulted in repressive and discursive discipline does not mean that such an outcome was inevitable. Rather than abandoning disclosure as a democratic project, we might ask ourselves how the rhetorical process of disclosure might open up a contradictory publicity that critically exposes the complexity of discipline itself.

The Google-China Dispute: The Chinese National Narrative and Rhetorical Legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party

In 2010, during the Google-China dispute, the Chinese Communist Party deployed a rhetoric imbued with the strong pathos of the “century of humiliation” (guochi) that China suffered at the hands of imperialists and used the Google incident to reaffirm its guardianship of the Chinese nation = state. As a case study, this discursive analysis of the Google dispute illustrates the rhetorical techniques and processes the Chinese Communist Party utilized to cement its legitimacy. Relying on the resistance-to-imperialism narrative template, the Chinese Government has circulated discourse that resonates with a public who continue to fear foreign infringement of sovereignty.

Idolatry and Accommodation: “Histoires” and Their Natural-Philosophical Interpretations in Simon Goulart’s Commentaires et annotations sur la Sepmaine de Du Bartas (1583)

This paper focuses on a specific instance of early modern Calvinist natural theology: what hermeneutics did reading the book of Nature through the spectacles of Scripture entail in Simon Goulart’s Commentaires et annotations sur la Sepmaine de Du Bartas? Goulart systematically reduces “idolatrous” mythological fables to their natural-philosophical content. He distinguishes these deceitful fables or “histories” from the natural-philosophical lessons that God accommodated to man’s understanding in the true “histories” of Scripture. However, this paper shows that the dismantling of idolatrous fables and the natural-philosophical interpretation of divine accommodation rely on the same rhetorical processes, namely allegory and narrative

The N-Town Presentation of Mary in the Temple and the Production of Rhetorical Knowledge

In this article, I argue that the Virgin Mary’s translating, glossing, and reciting of the fifteen Gradual Psalms upon her entrance to the Temple serve as models of the type of rhetorical and interpretive work that the lay audience of the Presentation of Mary is to emulate. Such work entails assiduous rhetorical inquiry into spiritual truths and humbly acknowledges the need for divine revelation. I then explore how Mary’s rhetorical efforts inform an encounter later in the play, when an angel feeds her heavenly food, and she, in turn, distributes conventional food to the impoverished people outside the Temple walls. I connect Mary’s eating and distribution of food to the late medieval metaphor likening food to spiritual teaching and argue that, by using Mary to distribute the spiritual “food” to the masses, the playwright signals the process by which spiritual instruction becomes more applicable to the interpretive situations of the play’s audience. I also argue that the playwright is advocating for a much larger group of rhetors, one that includes all who wish to take part in the rhetorical process started by Mary. I then explore the ways in which the playwright contributes to the late medieval debate concerning interpretive control over scripture and conclude by pointing out the essential relationship between Mary’s role as rhetorical catalyst and her more commonly recognized role as an exemplum of humility and charity.