Rhetorical Advantage Research Articles

The Idea of Sex Work

Abstract Focusing on the UK case, this essay explores how ideas and political practices around sex as work took root in a particular national space and shifted over time. Sex work helped to alter the political and social perception of sex traders, repudiating their marginality and positioning them in the mainstream of ordinary working lives. Beginning in the 1970s, political activists aligned the idea of sex as work with a defense of female practitioners as “ordinary” women doing ordinary women’s work. Sex work offered substantial rhetorical advantages for rights activists, who linked a work paradigm to practical demands for criminal justice reform and social and health initiatives. At the same time, the idea of sex as work provoked challenges inside and outside the ranks of sex traders. Antiviolence campaigners disputed that prostitution was a “job like any other” and competed with sex work projects for state resources and recognition. The discourse of sex work also occasioned some resistance within the ranks of sex traders, revealing disparate views about identity politics, the state and the market, and even what sex and work meant.

Rephrasing is not arguing, but it is still persuasive: An experimental approach to perlocutionary effects of rephrase

Rephrase is a pragmatically complex and persuasively appealing, yet still not systematically explored communication phenomenon. Evidence from corpus data indicates that speakers rephrase frequently in argumentative settings. In light of this empirical evidence, it is a tenable assumption that speakers (are perceived to) gain rhetorical advantages by rephrasing their own or someone else's contribution. In this paper, we present three experimental studies that seek to shed light on the potential persuasive appeal of rephrase.In our set of experiments, we exploit examples taken from the corpora of rephrased arguments annotated with OVA+ (Online Visualisation of Argument) software as material for the design of experiments that seek to test the rhetorical effectiveness of two sub-types of rephrase, namely rephrase specification and rephrase generalization. In particular, we observe whether judgements on persuasiveness are related to judgements on the perceived trustworthiness of the speaker.Our results suggest that rephrasing a contribution can impact both the perceived persuasiveness of a message and the perceived trustworthiness of the speaker. Moreover, our findings indicate that speakers perceive the segments connected through a rephrase relation as being very similar in content, which in turn suggests that rephrase is not perceived as providing a separate argument.

The Poetic Citations contained in Tafsir Al-Qurtubi and its Rhetorical Advantages

In order to perceive the meanings and importance of the words of Allah, the Muslim scholars have done their very best to keep and understand the rich and poetic classical Arabic language in both of its forms; prose and poetry fully taking care of its original state and good condition. Classic Arabic is more important as it plays its role as a store of lingu istic tools for understanding the Holy Quran and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (S A W) Abu Abdullah Al-Qurtabi (d.671) a famous commentator of the Holy Quran quoted on many occasions from Arab poets in his tafsir work “Al- Jame Le-Ahkam-e-Quran” to explain the meaning of certain words and phrases used in the Holy Quran. This article discusses and explains the rhetorical beauties of some of those verses along with their linguistic analysis and treatment explanation.

The Root of the Problem: Historical Narrative as Origin, End, and Impasse of Radical Social Change

ABSTRACT Although often treated as a controversy between radicals and conservatives, the current public imbroglio concerning so-called identity politics is just as much a matter of disagreement within progressivism’s big tent. Such a dispute is especially pronounced between classical Marxists and rival radical leftist groups that position race, rather than class, as the central problem facing egalitarian change. Starting from the idea that historical narrative represents a potent vector of argumentation, this essay contends that, from a rhetorical perspective, the conflict between Marxists and radical elements of identity-based politics can perhaps best be framed in terms of a contest over historical origin stories regarding the “root” cause of modern-day systems of oppression. By situating the controversy over racial identity in terms of origin narratives, this essay seeks to highlight the rhetorical advantages but also the pitfalls of this mode of argumentation.

The Root of the Problem: Historical Narrative as Origin, End, and Impasse of Radical Social Change

ABSTRACT Although often treated as a controversy between radicals and conservatives, the current public imbroglio concerning so-called identity politics is just as much a matter of disagreement within progressivism’s big tent. Such a dispute is especially pronounced between classical Marxists and rival radical leftist groups that position race, rather than class, as the central problem facing egalitarian change. Starting from the idea that historical narrative represents a potent vector of argumentation, this essay contends that, from a rhetorical perspective, the conflict between Marxists and radical elements of identity-based politics can perhaps best be framed in terms of a contest over historical origin stories regarding the “root” cause of modern-day systems of oppression. By situating the controversy over racial identity in terms of origin narratives, this essay seeks to highlight the rhetorical advantages but also the pitfalls of this mode of argumentation.

Scenarios, Probability, and Evidence Scholarship, Old and New.

Scenarios, Probability, and Evidence Scholarship, Old and New.

Epideictic Rhetoric Born Digital

The letter of recommendation (LOR) plays a significant role in the application process for many professional positions, offering descriptive rather than quantitative information from a third party about an individual’s potential fit within the hiring organization. Such letters, however, increasingly appear online, emphasizing existing problems within the genre and creating others involving trust, reliability, and confidentiality. Typically, the response has been that such digitization of the LOR minimizes its significance or standardizes it. This article analyzes the digital LOR genre as an exemplar of epideictic rhetoric situated within a Perelmanian framework and demonstrates how the digital LOR operates rhetorically, enhancing the adherence between candidate, writer, audience, and institutional values and providing a means of evaluating candidate fit. The article also offers a rhetorical heuristic that captures how audiences can more fruitfully read the epideictic, digital LOR, thereby demonstrating how to optimize the digital platform’s benefits and still use the LOR to its best rhetorical advantage.

“God within Us”: Christianity and Subversion in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's Fiction

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's paradoxical engagement with Christianity and its topology. Against his increasingly hostile attitude towards the Christian establishment in a post-colonial space, the paper interrogates how this writer, who has been dubbed a “religious writer,” deploys Christianity and its topology as a conduit for his subversion in his fiction. Partly informed by Stephen Greenblatt's seminal essay “Invisible Bullets” and its conception of containment and subversion, the article examines how Ngũgĩ uses Christianity and its topology to advance his literary and rhetorical agenda of exposing and questioning colonial and neo-colonial social injustices, hence turning such imagery and topology into powerful literary and rhetorical tools that embody the subversion of his works. Although colonialism and its link to the spread of Christianity has been exploited by many African writers in dialogical and syncretic ways characterised by subtle shades of meaning and expressions, Ngũgĩ has gone a step further to deploy to his aesthetic and rhetorical advantage the same Christianity that he attacks so fiercely. The paper also examines how the purpose and degree to which Ngũgĩ deploys Christianity as a constant subject and conduit of his subversive writing varies from his apprentice novels to his hard-hitting and ideologically astute and conscious novels. It contends that Ngũgĩ's subversion lies in both the implicit and explicit use of Christian imagery and typology as a conduit for conveying subversive messages that denounce manifestations of exploitation found in his native Kenya, in particular, and other African nation-states in general.

A retórica de Pontes de Miranda e os direitos fundamentais na república nova (1930-1945)

O objetivo é analisar criticamente os direitos do homem defendidos por Pontes de Miranda em no período da República Nova, também conhecida por Era Vargas. A metodologia empregada se vale da retórica, em seus níveis material, estratégico e analítico, para situar o ambiente em que esse jurista estava inserido e decompor as suas teses jurídicas e as suas estratégias discursivas reformadoras da ordem capitalista. O artigo sustenta a hipótese de que a tese pontiana legitima a constitucionalização de direitos humanos a partir de um compromisso estatal de atenuação constante das contradições sociais geradas pelo capitalismo. Para corroborar a tese do artigo, a estratégia discursiva de Pontes de Miranda metaforiza uma teoria socialista a partir da figura do Estado, como ente acima das classes sociais, núcleo gestor da economia e da sociedade e regulador dos conflitos e das contradições sociais. Sua posição advoga um constitucionalismo que equilibra direitos de propriedade com o mundo do trabalho como condição para a efetividade das garantias fundamentais gerais. Os direitos fundamentais aparecem fundados, sobretudo, em vínculos externos ao direito e no exercício do poder. Como as relações capitalistas de produção acabam por aprofundar a divisão do trabalho, esses vínculos e fatores de poder devem ser recepcionados pelo Direito; a ordem constitucional passa a ser medida pela existência e pelo choque de diferentes classes sociais. A Constituição passa a ser um meio de confluência de vários saberes e fundamental para a efetividade do equilíbrio social e fator de prevenção da violência política e revolucionária.

Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in theRepository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art

“The First Stage of Life” (1861) is a six-page short story by Maria W. Stewart, African American woman writer, orator, and activist. It is serialized in three parts in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art in April, July, and October 1861. From 1858 to 1863, the Repository was a black magazine administered by black men and designed for black readers. It was based in Indianapolis, and in 1861 its chief editor was John Mifflin Brown. Published quarterly with each edition containing just over twenty bound pages of poems, parables, and essays, the magazine attracted black households with rising amounts of disposable income and leisure time. Today, the Repository is a non-circulating, non-digitized, rare black magazine on microfilm at the Indiana State Library with one extant issue housed in Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Stewart’s serialized story about a black girl’s coming-of-age published in an early black magazine broadens the contributions African American women have made to nineteenth-century print culture, and her early emphasis on black girlhood invites further study on the methodologies, frameworks, and emerging trends that continue to shape the canon of early African American literature and print culture. This article explores what we gain by examining the intersection of black girlhood and black print culture studies. To define black girlhood, nineteenth-century African American women writers distinguish between youthful and knowing girlhood, a demarcation that is represented by a black girl’s age and offers rhetorical advantages for race activists. Identifying black girls as youthful and therefore childlike removes sexual suggestion from their bodies. The growth from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood occurs when black girls gain a deepened awareness of their precarious positions and seek methods for their survival. To emphasize a black girl’s age as a textual marker recognizes that, similar to all women, black women in the antebellum period experience a youthful period and undergo distinct stages of growth and maturity into

Reading the rhetor in postcolonial African fiction: Armah’s Two thousand seasons as an illustration

For some time now, rhetors have steadily gained a firm hold on postcolonial African fiction in various versions of what narratologists designate as extradiegetic narrators. One such guise is the communal voice because of the rhetorical advantages these rhetors enjoy as the centre of social, historical, and political consciousness. Yet, in spite of the rhetors’ pervasiveness in postcolonial African prose, little has been said in African critical practice about these fascinating narrative agents since most of the emphasis has been on canonical African texts – what Lindfors designates as the ‘long drums and canons’. Happily, the end of the twentieth century saw a shift in the concerns of African criticism, bringing narratological criteria to bear on postcolonial African fiction. This article theorises the deployment of the rhetor in Two thousand seasons, arguing that the rhetor is privileged because of the ideological force he assumes and his authoritative point of view. It is intended as a contribution to the study of narratology in the African novel, revealing the significance of the rhetorical strategies that guarantee the future of the rhetor as an agency in postcolonial African fiction. For these reasons, this discussion supports a critical discourse of African texts that is, in Culler’s words,‘a poetics, a study of the conditions of meaning’ in postcolonial African fiction.

Equality, opportunity, ambiguity

I distinguish four different interpretations of ‘equality of opportunity.’ We get four interpretations because a neglected ambiguity in ‘opportunity’ intersects a well-known ambiguity in ‘equality.’ The neglected ambiguity holds between substantive and non-substantive conceptions of ‘opportunity’ and the well-known ambiguity holds between comparative and non-comparative conceptions of ‘equality.’ Among other things, distinguishing these four interpretations reveals how misleading ‘equal opportunity for advantage’ formulations of luck egalitarianism can be. These formulations are misleading in so far as they obscure the difference between two separate claims about which inequalities are consistent with true equality. Luck egalitarianism claims that inequalities that have been chosen in some suitable sense are consistent with true equality, while the traditional ideal of equality of opportunity only claims that inevitable inequalities that have been determined through fair competitions are consistent with true equality. Obscuring the difference between these two claims therefore serves both to arrogate the rhetorical advantages of the traditional ideal to luck egalitarianism and to cover over a limitation to luck egalitarianism’s ambition to provide a comprehensive principle of distributive justice.

Gertrude Bonnin's Rhetorical Strategies of Silence

Gertrude Bonnin’s Rhetorical Strategies of Silence Elizabeth Wilkinson (bio) When one powerful group or individual silences another less powerful group or individual, silence can be viewed as a marker of victimhood. A simplistic example: any public protest that is summarily shut down is silenced, the protesters victims of being silenced. Silence as an indicator of victim status presupposes a gaze from outside looking in and describes silence that happens as a result of oppression. In contrast, even from a position of less power, individuals can use silence not as a victim-based reaction to but as a central strategy of action for. For example, Audra Simpson’s discussions with Mohawk peoples on the issue of tribal membership and citizenship show rhetorical deployment of silence with the goal of negotiating an intricate political situation (76–78). Following the idea of silence as purposeful rhetorical strategy, this article explores the less widely acknowledged use of silence(s) by Yankton writer and activist Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša.1 She deploys manifestations of silence, particularly in the report Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians and in her Atlantic Monthly trilogy on Indian boarding school, as an expression of rhetorical agency and discursive power, in both instances primarily addressing an uninformed and predominantly white audience. The goal of this article is to provide another angle from which to evaluate Bonnin’s sophisticated rhetoric; that is, to examine, define, and analyze the multiple iterations of silence and silencing she uses to promote her political purposes. I argue that Gertrude Bonnin uses strategies of silence and of delayed discourse to unsettle her white readers, forcing them to acknowledge the unbalanced relationship between Anglo-America and Native America in the early 1900s. She writes with the obvious goal of urging readers to reform their own and subsequently the US government’s beliefs and actions. [End Page 33] In the 1924 report Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery (opri), Bonnin uses a variety of silences (her own act of being silent) and descriptions of silencing (herself or another silenced by outside forces) as tools for rhetorical advantage when writing for the Euro-American public and political audience. Bonnin coauthored opri, a report destined for Congress and commissioned by the Indian Rights Association (ira), with two white men, Charles H. Fabens and Matthew K. Sniffens. Their hope was to expose and end rampant abuses of Indian peoples by corrupt agents, businessmen, judges, and lawyers in Oklahoma. In the portion of the report that is clearly authored by Bonnin, she provides case studies of victims of Oklahoma’s “legalized robbery,” beginning with the heinous crimes committed against the childlike, eighteen-year-old woman Millie Neharkey. Within the span of a handful of paragraphs in the opri report, and specifically in writing about Millie’s case, Bonnin displays some of her most pointedly effective uses of rhetorical silences. However, a much longer and textually complex deployment of these strategies of silence and silencing appears almost a quarter of a century earlier in what is perhaps her most widely known and anthologized writings, her Atlantic Monthly trilogy originally published in January, February, and March of 1900 (republished in the collection American Indian Stories in 1921). In these semi-autobiographical essays entitled “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” Bonnin’s uses of silence and silencings are more subtle but have transparent rhetorical purpose. The trilogy, published when she was approximately twenty-four years old, was her first major publication, and while it can be read simply as an entertaining bildungsroman of an Indian girl, it is more importantly a scathing polemic criticizing the Indian boarding school system and is an important early example of her use of rhetorical silence. Because Bonnin’s clear and powerful rhetorical strategies of silences and silencings are more easily discernable in the concise paragraphs of opri (1924), I discuss that work first and establish definitions essential to my discussion of silence in the Atlantic Monthly trilogy (1900). By unpacking the terminology in the later piece and then applying it to the earlier, I shed new light...

THE SORROW THAT DARE NOT SAY ITS NAME: THE INADEQUATE FATHER, THE MOTOR OF HISTORY

Although the following essay is literary‐philosophical, it arose from a practical interest. I have been struck by how widespread today is the complaint about the ‘inadequate father’. Of course a father may be inadequate in diverse ways, either absconding, absent and weak, or overbearing, bullying, and tyrannical, or some combination of these. Further, I am not restricting the term ‘father’ to its narrow biological sense, but using it rather as a metaphor for any institution or structure which an individual or a group feels should have been in place to guide, direct, and protect them in important situations, but did not do its job properly. Consequently they are willing to concede they are not all they could have been, but they insist it is not their fault, rather the fault of the ‘father’ who should have done his job better. This ties in with the fashionable appeal of ‘victimhood’. Everybody today seems to want to cast themselves as a ‘victim’, for reasons similar to those mentioned above. If you are a ‘victim’, then there must be an ‘oppressor’– and some ‘parent’ organization that should have guided, directed, and protected you against the oppressor, but again did not do its job adequately. It is striking how many individuals and groups around the world today choose to perceive themselves, and to present themselves to others, as ‘victims’; it has indeed become a preferred characterization of our age, for it carries with it a rhetorical advantage that trumps all others. If you are able to cast yourself as a ‘victim’, and have others accept this, you disarm and neutralize criticism, not only of what you are, but of what you are currently doing – because the latter can be presented as a just ‘compensation’ for what you have suffered. As with guilt, there is no built‐in quota or statute of limitations. This rhetoric was not as common thirty or forty years ago.There is an added factor here in America and the New World generally where, according to a whispered criticism, as our ancestors crossed the ocean, they experienced a ‘drop in civilization’. Life here was initially without some of the structures and institutions which had evolved over thousands of years in the Old World, which could thus be presumed there but here were absent. As we won with difficulty our independence, we unconsciously repudiated much of the ‘higher culture’ of the colonial master, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As the ‘economic bubble’ of having won the Second World War has gradually dissipated, we discover we are handicapped by an absence of the forms of maturation and self‐realization that arise in and are necessary for dealing with prolonged peace. In our ‘ideology of liberty’, our adults become essentially grown children, unschooled in anything higher, and thus have particular difficulty assuming the responsibilities of parenthood. They are forced to fall back upon a military style of giving orders, because on this side of the water, ‘final causes’ in the form of commonly admired or agreed on goals for striving are not in place. In this sense there is an absence of the ‘adequate father’. Further, as ‘American Culture’ expands through publicity and the media, we spread the same disease.There is another relevant factor, the ‘celebrity‐liberationist’ lifestyle that has been diffused into the general population since the 1960's and has become a default secular ethic of our time, replacing the traditional Judeo‐Christian decalogue. The former is invoked as a justification for aggressively seeking fame and fortune, and making no attempt to conceal this; rather than worrying that such an attitude will cause offense, it is worn proudly and defiantly in the hope that others will identify with it, thereby branding the performer a cultural hero. This popular strategy towards fulfilment itself rests on a metaphysic of ‘expressive individualism’, a position that holds that the supreme ethical imperative to which other obligations must be subordinated is for each to bring forward their hidden noumenal core, the only source of value, into phenomenal appearances where it may be admired and benefit others and such that creation will for the first time be complete. This change in Western culture made possible by greater affluence and security represents a trickle‐down phenomenon and democritization of the awe reserved for the artist revered as a genius during the nineteenth century, now spread to the entire population. Anything that constrains this expansion, which interrupts or limits this transfer, is to be rejected as parental abuse, psychological repression, or cultural imperialism.

Object-Based Epistemology at a Creationist Museum

In a regional young-earth creationist museum, objects are presented as if they speak for themselves, purportedly embodying proof that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, that humans have lived on earth throughout its history, and that dinosaurs and humans lived simultaneously. In public lectures, tours, and displays, museum associates emphasize direct observation over inference or theory. These emphases resonate closely with the “object-based epistemology” of the late nineteenth century described in Steven Conn’s Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. In Conn’s description, museum objects, artfully arranged and displayed, were intended to speak for themselves, and observation and categorization were valued over experiment and theory. The regional young-earth creationist museum is observed to partly succeed and partly fail in implementing an object-based epistemology. Although object-based epistemology represents a nineteenth-century approach to knowledge and museum display, it is compatible with an inductive approach to biblical interpretation and it confers various rhetorical advantages to creationist arguments. It is concluded that a focus on the theory-laden nature of data would likely strengthen nature-of-science education efforts to increase public acceptance of evolution.

When economics meets neuroscience: hype and hope

This is a paper on interdisciplinarity and rhetoric. Neuroeconomics is hype, but this does not rule out entertaining hopes about its capacity to produce some desirable consequences. Its ‘disciplinary conventions’ are characterized as those of a young interdisciplinary field. Its rhetorical advantages are identified, and its rhetorical excesses are put in perspective and conditionally excused. Its evidential roles are emphasized, and they are shown to be limited in alleviating the under-constraint issue due to the difficulty of using fMRI properly.

The Conservative Capture of Anti-Relativist Discourse in Postwar America

As both conservatives and liberals rethought their fundamental assumptions in the wake of World War II, leaders of the conservative movement sought to combine anti-relativist cultural belifs with the traditional conservative concern with limited government. By attacking liberal icon John Dewey and his philosophy of pragmatism, conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr., Richard Weaver, Eliseo Vivas, and Frank Meyer carried the banner of eternal truth as a right-wing rallying point. By mid-century, conservatives had captured the discourse of philosophical foundationalism for their cause and used this new principle to gain political success by ascribing societal problems to “liberal relativism.” Yet, what they gained in rhetorical advantage, they gave up in ideological coherence as postwar conservatives found themselves promoting state-sponsored truths, while also professing a libertarian belief in limited government.

Strategic Maneuvering through Persuasive Definitions: Implications for Dialectic and Rhetoric

In the pragma-dialectical research program, strategic maneuvering refers to processes of seeking rhetorical advantage while meeting one’s dialectical obligations. One principal means of strategic maneuvering is the use of persuasive definitions, those in which connotations are changed while keeping the denotation constant, or vice-versa. Brief examples and an extended case study (the labeling of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as “war”) demonstrate that strategic maneuvering functions analogously, if not identically, in dialectic and rhetoric.

Composition as an Act of Performance: Artifice and Expression in Purcell's Sacred Partsong Since God so tender a regard

Since God so tender a regard is one of a small number of ‘domestic sacred’ pieces Purcell entered into his manuscript scorebook, London, British Library, Add. MS 30930. Its particular interest lies in its construction over a ground bass, and the range of artificial devices Purcell employs in its setting. Its background in seventeenth-century psalm settings, and its likely performance circumstances, allowed Purcell to turn these features to rhetorical advantage, with highly imaginative and individual results.

The Hollowness of the Harm Principle

Among the various instruments in the toolbox of liberalism, the so-called principle, presented as the central thesis of John Stuart Mill's classic On Liberty, has been one of the most popular. The harm principle has been widely embraced and invoked in both academic and popular debate about a variety of issues ranging from obscenity to drug regulation to abortion to same-sex marriage, and its influence is discernible in legal arguments and judicial opinions as well. Despite the principle's apparent irresistibility, this essay argues that the principle is hollow. It is an empty vessel, alluring but without any inherent legal or political content, into which advocates can pour whatever substantive views and values they happen to favor. Perhaps the major problem that results is that advocates are tempted to advance their values and views not on their substantive merits, but rather by promoting the vessel, or the packaging. And like the harm principle itself, that temptation has proven irresistible - not merely to the office party debater or the talk show host, but to sophisticated philosophers as well, notably including the principle's most articulate proponents: J. S. Mill and Joel Feinberg. All in all, the harm principle serves to confuse and distract, and to permit advocates to gain illicit rhetorical advantage without earning their way. Our public deliberations would accordingly be enhanced if the harm principle were retired from duty.