Rhetorical Project Research Articles

Migration and more: the entanglements within and beyond the Immigration Act of 1924

ABSTRACT This forum brings scholars across rhetorical interests together in conversation around the 100-year anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924. The six essays consider the overt legislation—border regulation—within its historic, ongoing, and contemporary significance. Asking questions that consider borders, migration, and regulation broadly, the authors here move through questions of surveillance, belonging, space, militarization, embodiment, and empire. In doing so, this forum expands the rhetorical project of border rhetorics, naming the expansive reach of borders and border rhetorics.

On Invocatory Rhetoric: Against the Metaphysics of the Other

Abstract This essay explores the figure of invocation across the philosophical and rhetorical traditions in order better to understand its role in symbolic life. From Augustine to Quintilian, and from Lyotard to Lacan, it argues that a rhetorical notion of invocation must extend itself beyond the mere dimension of the call. Exhuming an overlooked definition from Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, it proposes that invocation should be reconceptualized in a way that emphasizes its aversus. The consequence is that an invocatory rhetorical project—indeed, the device itself—insists against the metaphysics of the Other. Invoking Quintilian, it argues for a redefinition on the basis of invocation’s particularity as a figure, its polemic, and its publicity.

From corpus creation to formative discovery: the power of big-data-rhetoric teams and methods

ABSTRACT Rhetoric has been slow to adopt big-data techniques, but that is changing. In this article, we describe the formative work of our rhetoric-data science team on an ideographic analysis of state veteran laws. Our interdisciplinary approach enabled us to build a corpus of more than 7,000 files, segment that corpus into likely public and private laws, and develop dictionaries for discerning individual entitlements, such as waived fees for gun permits. Early results show state-level trends in the number of veteran laws, proportion of veteran laws concerning disabled veterans, and proportion of veteran/disability laws affording individual entitlements. While this article presents early findings, its broader purpose is to contribute to discussions of corpus building, data cleaning, formative analysis, and the value of big-data-rhetoric collaborations. Our experience provides five insights: (1) big-data collection methods can save a public rhetoric project when customary retrieval methods fail; (2) big-data-rhetoric work starts conceptually and becomes concretized; (3) formative big-data rhetoric work can problematize fundamental research assumptions, such as what should be included in a corpus; (4) big-data methods can produce interesting results early, yielding a roadmap for future work; and (5) big-data-rhetoric teams need more guidance from the field.

Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University

Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University

The Ways that Parted in the Library: The Gospels according to Matthew and according to the Hebrews in Late Ancient Heresiology

This article traces how early Christian thinkers (including Irenaeus, Eusebius, Epiphanius and Jerome) conceptualised ‘Jewishness’ in bibliographic terms. The material that early Christian sources associate with the Gospel according to the Hebrews exhibits a substantial textual relationship with the Gospel according to Matthew. The distinction emerges within a fourth- and fifth-century heresiological project of bibliographic categorisation that seeks to differentiate Jewish and Christian books and readers. Bibliography is a way of distinguishing reading communities and thereby advances the late ancient rhetorical project often known as the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.

Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore

Reviewed by: Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore Finbarr Curtis Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. Edited by Andrew S. Moore. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 197. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7434-0.) The proclamation of 1976 as the "Year of the Evangelical" in the United States served as the capstone of a conventional narrative in which theologically conservative Protestants disappeared from American politics in the [End Page 425] mid-twentieth century only to reemerge in the 1970s with the uncomfortable pairing of the presidency of Jimmy Carter and the rise of the religious Right. Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump brings together ten insightful essays on a range of themes that consider what happened in the four decades between President Carter and President Donald J. Trump. The book uses the year of the evangelical as an organizing theme, but several contributors challenge the conventional narrative. The first essay, by Randall J. Stephens, discusses how opposition to communism drew evangelicals into politics long before the 1970s. This activism did have some features of disengagement as it was a kind of anti-politics that saw "godless communism" as a pervasive feature of an expanding liberal welfare state that needed to be curtailed to protect Christian liberty (p. 17). In several chapters that explore the intersection of racial and religious identities, suspicions of an expansion of government overlapped with suspicions of the expansion of civil rights. Dan Wells's perceptive essay on Eldridge Cleaver demonstrates the whiteness of evangelicalism, as the former Black Panther was expected to speak in a white idiom that disavowed his radical past. Opposition to civil rights is central to Randall Balmer's chapter on the changing makeup of anti-abortion activism over the course of the 1970s. In Balmer's analysis, abortion, a largely Catholic issue at the time of Roe v. Wade (1973), became a rallying point for conservative Protestants who were upset at desegregated schools but needed a more respectable means to mobilize support for racialized family values. There is some divergence among the essays about how early evangelical opposition to abortion took shape. Balmer focuses on the coalition-building project of political activists. Essays by Allison Vander Broek and Daniel K. Williams suggest that while Catholics were the most visible and organized in their opposition to abortion, there was a latent theological appeal that fit with conservative Protestant attitudes toward sexuality. The book does not promise complete coverage of the years from Carter to Trump, but one notable feature is that Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Trump capture the most attention. Jeff Frederick sees the rise of Trumpism as the loss of what he calls Carter's "evangelical political authenticity" (p. 140). J. Brooks Flippen's essay on Reagan considers the irony of how a divorced actor with sporadic church attendance became the exemplar of the Christian Right. R. Ward Holder shares Frederick's view that enthusiasm for Trump represents a betrayal of evangelical principles. These chapters tell a declension story that moves from a sincere Carter, to a pragmatic compromise with Reagan, to a full-blown abandonment of moral character with Trump. There is some confusion that extends beyond this book over whether the use of the label evangelical describes a group of people or whether it is a rhetorical project to invent a group of people. In the former, evangelical describes a theological orientation that includes diverse racial, political, and religious groups as well as a set of principles used to applaud the sincerity of Carter and lament the immorality of Trump. In the latter, this rhetorical project has political, national, and racial dimensions that are internal to the claim of working within a conservative Protestant tradition. Hannah Dick most clearly articulates the latter position with her assertion that white evangelicalism is simultaneously [End Page 426] "a cultural framework, a religious affiliation, a class-based category, and a political orientation" (p. 174). One question the book raises is whether someone like Carter represents authentic evangelicalism or whether he is an idiosyncratic figure who represents the theological ideals of evangelical academics...

Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, by Michelle Bolduc, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies

Michelle Bolduc’s Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric is, as a work of scholarship, quite formidable. Its 443 pages include 1,324 footnotes and 71 pages of bibliography. Its historical focus is brilliant and complex, with chapters on medieval translatio, Cicero’s translation and replanting of Greek rhetoric, Brunetto Latini’s translation of Cicero, Jean Paulhan’s reinvention of rhetoric following Latini, and the New Rhetoric Project’s own taking up of this tradition in the twentieth century.From one perspective, the book can be read somewhat straightforwardly as a carefully selected history of rhetoric, and anyone who reads the book from this perspective would gain some serious knowledge of the rhetorical tradition. A clear narrative guides the reader along even as the story is a story of retrieval, moving forward by reaching back. The subnarratives within this larger telling are full of lively episodes that are historically revealing and biographically rich. At times the book reads almost like a series of intellectual mini-novels—with standout characters.However, the overriding concern here is not the characters or the stories—as interesting as those may be—but the illuminating of the historical process of translation in a very large sense—in the sense of the medieval topos of translatio, a sense that is dynamic and propelling and history forming and in fact explains how traditions generate. The principal characters in this story are all engaged in the translation of rhetorical texts, the transfer of meaning from one language to another—as well as, often, a transfer from one culture to another of rhetoric as a pedagogy and a sociopolitical practice. Opening up these civilizational channels through translation is part of the dynamic of translatio, and the outcome is, in part, to generate civilizational practices that address contemporary challenges by placing them in the light of a translation of historical rhetorical texts. So, for example, when Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write The New Rhetoric as a culmination of that postwar intellectual arc that included Perelman’s work with the UN, they are engaged in a translatio whose purpose is to defeat violence through the recovery of rhetoric as a form of effective reasoning in conditions of uncertainty.Bolduc is quite careful to avoid any notion of a continuous rational development of the translatio of rhetoric over time, but she insists that breaks and failures can themselves (later) be seen to have contributed to this translatio in serendipitous ways. Her serious and extensive treatment of Brunetto Latini and Jean Paulhan is instructive here. And yet this is not only a work of careful historical scholarship. One of the book’s first examples of translatio is Alan of Lille’s mind-boggling account of the incarnation as mystical translatio, the Word translated into flesh, and the book’s afterword virtually concludes with a discussion of The New Rhetoric’s modern notions of communion and freedom. This is also a work of vision—and of multilingual hope.

بلاغة جمهور الخطاب الشعري:, قصيدة كعكة الميدان لإدريس الملياني أنموذجا

This article approaches rhetoric of the audience of the poetic discourse in the poem The cake of the field by the Moroccan poet Idriss Melyani, based on a new rhetorical perception, borrowing his methodological tools from the work of the Egyptian researcher Emad Abdel Latif, from our belief in the importance of his rhetorical project, and his ability to open up to various speeches, including poetry, unlike most studies that She restricted her attention to daily speeches and mass reflexes.

From Association to Dissociation: The NRP's translatio of Gourmont

ABSTRACT This study explores the influence of the French Symbolist poet, novelist, and literary critic Remy de Gourmont on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's conception of dissociation. It proposes translatio—the medieval trope describing a transfer of ideas—as a lens through which to read the significance of Gourmont's thought on the New Rhetoric Project (NRP). Thus forgoing more traditional comparative approaches such as intertextuality, this study argues that translatio serves here as a particularly valuable conceptual tool: it unveils the evolution of Perelman's thought over time, and Olbrechts-Tyteca's significant contribution to it; it also provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between association (in the guise of analogy) and dissociation in the NRP than what is generally understood by scholars of the Traité. More importantly, translatio unveils the features that make their conception of dissociation one of the truly innovative aspects of the NRP.

The New Rhetoric Project Laughs: Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Dissociation, and the Comic

ABSTRACT Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1974 chapter on dissociation in the comic furthers our understanding of the rhetorical possibilities of dissociation, revealing how the concept can dismantle old worldviews and create new ones through laughter. Thanks to issues with translation and the chapter's obscure examples, however, this text has been largely overlooked by scholars. This article grounds the chapter's theories in examples with more contemporary resonance as a necessary first step toward understanding the full scope of Olbrechts-Tyteca's contributions to the concept of dissociation. Considering Olbrechts-Tyteca's chapter in light of other texts from the New Rhetoric Project also calls attention to the ways that translation practices have shaped scholars' reception and use of the Project's concepts.

Isaiah 40:1–2: Reading Royal Commission as a Call for Return Migration in the Early Persian Period

This paper offers a new interpretation of Isa 40:1–2 that takes into account the greater rhetorical project of Isa 40–48 as well as evidence of Judean diaspora life from Āl–Yāḫūdu. Rather than a charge to the divine council, the call to comfort Jerusalem is meant to inspire an embedded community of Judeo-Babylonians to return migrate by hailing them as members of Yahweh's royal procession. This new reading gestures towards broader questions of Judean diaspora identity in the 6th century.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Female Imbeciles

ABSTRACTMary Wollstonecraft’s invectives against women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ostensibly an argument for improved female education, have long troubled readers. Why does Wollstonecraft rely on rhetoric that shows contempt for women’s “imbecility” to convince her readers of women’s capacity for intelligence? By placing Wollstonecraft’s use of the term in the context of both her model of mind and the late-eighteenth-century discourse on cognitive disability, I show how Wollstonecraft’s indictment of female “imbecility” functions as part of her larger rhetorical project to link the problem of unequal female education to the inequities of the monarchical state.

The Rhetoric of Krishna versus the Counter-Rhetoric of Vyas: The Place of Commiseration in the Mahabharat

In the context of the mixed perception among scholars whether the Mahabharat is a pacifist or a militant text, this paper analyzes the rhetorical project of the epic to examine its position on violence. Highlighting the existence of two main arguments in the Mahabharat, this paper argues that the author has crafted a grand rhetorical project to question the dominant war ideology of the time that Krishna presents as the divine necessity. Historically, the emergence of Krishna—one of the major characters of the epic—as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu in Hindu tradition and the extraction and elevation of the Bhagavad Gita from the epic as an independent text have undermined the complexity of Vyas’ rhetoric. This paper places Krishna’s argument within the broad rhetorical scheme of the epic and demonstrates how Vyas has represented Krishna’s rhetoric of ‘just war’ only to illustrate its pitfalls. By directing his narrative lens to the devastating consequences of the war in the later parts of the epic, Vyas problematizes Krishna’s insistence on the need to suppress human emotions to attain a higher cognitive and ontological condition. What emerges is the difference between how Vyas and Krishna view the status of feeling: the scientist Krishna thinks that human emotions and individual lives are trivial, incidental instances in the cosmic game—something not worthy of a warrior’s concern; Vyas’ rhetoric, this paper argues, restores the significance of ordinary human emotions. It is a war—not human life and feeling—that arises as a futile enterprise in Vyas’ rhetoric.

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: Introduction

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: Introduction

An Introduction to and Translation of Chaïm Perelman’s 1933De l’arbitraire dans laconnaissance[On the Arbitrary in Knowledge

ABSTRACTThis is an introduction to and translation of Chaïm Perelman’s “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance” published in 1933 by Maurice Lambertin publishing house. De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance has important implications for an understanding of Perelman’s intellectual development generally and specifically for an understanding the evolution of his New Rhetoric Project.

An Introduction to and Translation of Chaïm Perelman’s 1933 De l’arbitraire dans laconnaissance [On the Arbitrary in Knowledge

ABSTRACTThis is an introduction to and translation of Chaïm Perelman’s “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance” published in 1933 by Maurice Lambertin publishing house. De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance has important implications for an understanding of Perelman’s intellectual development generally and specifically for an understanding the evolution of his New Rhetoric Project.

Arguing Over Texts: The Rhetoric of Interpretation

Arguing Over Texts: The Rhetoric of Interpretation

Paving the Way to Prosperity: Ford Motor Company’s Films, Interstitial Rhetoric, and the Production of Economic Space in the Interwar Period

This essay examines the production of economic space as a rhetorical project in the motion picture work of Ford Motor Company between 1918 and 1945. On film, Ford’s overlapping visual narratives worked to position abstractions like markets, commodities, and class as spatially experienced entities grounded in the materiality of roads, village industries, and national parks. When presented to an American public working through ideas of national identity, isolationism, and economic depression during the interwar period, these films played an integral role in shaping the trajectory of the American landscape to this day. Moreover, in taking up this set of artifacts, I position Ford Motor Company as a unique category of spatial rhetor—an institutional figure large enough and powerful enough to generate and distribute narratives that can crack open the codified elements of social life and insert, in the newly formed intermediary spaces, images of individuals performing industrial or corporate identities.

A Good Distance: Rawls and the New Rhetoric Project

In light of the genuine disagreement between the seemingly non-rhetorical political philosophy of John Rawls and the philosophical rhetoric of the new rhetoric project I propose a re-reading of Rawls that will help move that project in a needed direction. This re-reading will make the case that (1) Rawls’s conception of justice implies a commitment to the reasonable that is very like the new rhetoric projects, that (2) their differences regarding distance—in particular the distancing strategies of impartiality and objectivity—can be reconciled, that (3) the major difference between them—that is, the role of the rational—comes down to Rawls’s willingness to try universalizing the good, and that (4) such universalizing is a resource of rhetorical particularity that adds value to the construction of the universal audience.

Reasonable and Rational: Renewed Loci for Rhetorical Justice

AbstractWhereas the new rhetoric project associates the rational with the certainty of abstract objectivism, normative philosophy associates the rational with the ethical (the good), that is, the individual's pursuit of a life well lived. Normative philosophy distinguishes the ethical, then, not from the rational but from the moral (the reasonable), which represents the obligations we have toward others to ensure just relations among people. In philosophy, the rational and reasonable function as loci for arguments about values, but their rhetorical resourcefulness is dismissed rather than elaborated by the philosophy reviewed here, which gives the reasonable's abstract objectivity priority over the concrete preferences embodied by the rational. The concrete objectivism so important to the new rhetoric project could be more fully redeemed, I suggest, were the new rhetoric project to transform philosophy's rational-reasonable distinction into two uneasily coexisting, mutually reinforcing loci.