Rhetorical Context Research Articles

‘Public’ Science: Hydrogen Balloons and Lavoisier's Decomposition of Water

Summary The balloon mania between 1783 and 1785 put an extraordinary strain on the Paris Academy of Sciences, threatening its status as the highest tribunal of European science. Faced with repeated royal directives and public frenzy, the Academy manoeuvred carefully to steer the research toward the hydrogen balloon and thereby to maintain its scientific superiority. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier seized this moment when the promise of ‘the empire of airs’ brought science to the centre of public attention to push his theoretical reform for chemistry. He utilized the established protocol of the Academy and the resources of the Republic of Letters to broadly publicize his first decomposition of water in April 1784. Once he attained the publicity and the balloon fever began to cool, he staged a much more elaborate experiment for the experts in February 1785. Although this second, large-scale experiment cost much expense and effort, Lavoisier never published a full account. The differential care given to the two experiments can only be understood in their divergent rhetorical contexts. The written accounts in 1784 addressed the court of public opinion, while the exclusive performance in 1785 aimed at the court of experts to inaugurate the collaborative phase of the Chemical Revolution.

Intercultural Rhetoric, Technology Transfer, and Writing in U.S.–Mexico Border Maquilas

This article explores the transfer of U.S. technologies to three maquilas, or joint U.S.–Mexican manufacturing facilities in northern Mexico. Drawing on case study methods, it focuses on the rhetorical strategies that Mexican engineers and manufacturing personnel used to translate U.S. technologies and corresponding documentation for their Mexican contexts. It also suggests ways U.S. technical communicators can adapt their documentation to be more effective for these U.S.–Mexican intercultural rhetorical contexts.

The Body and the Decent Inner Self: Letters by Julie Björckegren, Wife of a Swedish Mayor, 1789–91

The body of the individual aroused special interest in discourses of the European Enlightenment. One of the questions at stake in literary, rhetorical and epistolary practices concerned what can be inferred about a person's inner self on the basis of his or her bodily appearance. In the second half of the 1700s, the new epistolary rhetoricians recommended that letter writers throw off the stiff personas of classical rhetoric and instead perform the discourse of the heart. The proposed performance, however, was constrained by new parameters, not least strong gender biases. The impact of these cultural discourses are discussed in relation to letters written between 1789 and 1791 by Julie Björckegren, the wife of a Swedish mayor, to Count Carl Sparre, her former lover. Her writing about her body and her social roles is interpreted as a self-reflective practice formed within the constraints of the rhetorical and cultural context. By this practice she shapes her subjectivity and constructs her self as a bourgeois woman.

The enigmatic plurals like "one of us" (Genesis i 26, iii 22, and xi 7) in hyperchronic perspective

AbstractThe enigma of the first person plural pronouns in Gen. i 26, iii 22, and xi 7 can be resolved by careful consideration of their rhetorical and hyperchronic contexts. All three instances emanate from the same speaker in similar situations. Their common rhetorical purpose is to mark out the ontological boundaries between gods and humans. The first person plurals schematize the "we," of "the gods," versus the "them," of "the humans."

Paul's Judaism Reconsidered

The present study focuses on cultic imagery in the Corinthian correspondence as a test case to reconsider Paul’s relation to Judaism. Previous approaches of spiritualisation, substitution and direct comparison with Qumran Judaism do not stand up to scrutiny when they are applied to pre-70 Christianity, in particular to Paul. The rhetorical contexts of his statements about Judaism make it clear that Paul argued against a perverse understanding of a Jewish way of life rather than rejecting every sense of belonging to Jewish tradition. A survey of examples from Hellenistic-Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and Palestinian Jewish texts together with the exegesis of 1 Corinthians leads to the conclusion that Paul relied on Palestinian Jewish temple-theological traditions for some of his moral instructions. The apostle couched them in the language of Jewish cultic imagery, knowing that the Corinthian readers were familiar with Jewish traditions.

Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion by Michael Moriarty (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2005 813 works, the title-page disguises the relationship between text and paratext. The Def? fence is reproduced first(pp. 11-85), with no notes or critical apparatus. There follow an extensive 'commentaire' upon the text (pp. 89-370), a modest section of variants and notes (pp. 371-411) and selected extracts from Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue (pp. 412-26), and finallya selective critical bibliography (largely dominated by studies in French) and fine index. It is a shame that the editors were not able to include the whole of Speroni's text, nor Aneau's Quintil horatien. The explanation for this probably lies in a discreet reference (p. 372) to another forthcoming edition of the Def? fence, with Classiques Didier, which should contain these materials. None the less, the lacuna is the more evident here since the 'commentaire' is effectivelya monographlength study of the rhetorical context of the Dejfence. Its author, Goyet, does not?as one might have expected?follow the Deffence chapter by chapter; rather,he provides a synthetic and discursive study of seminal passages. He chooses to focus particularly upon the relationship between Du Bellay's treatment of elocutio and its status in key classical authors (notably in Cicero's Orator) and in Du Bellay's immediate predecessors (Dolet's La Maniere de bien traduire is subjected to a rigorous critical analysis). This argument prizes elocutio as the key to understanding Du Bellay's concept of imitation. Goyet sets himself the Herculean task of not only balancing polemical and technical approaches to the text, but also, in his analysis of Du Bellay's poetics, of retaining the enthusiasm forthe Deffencewhich, he argues, is missing from the work of so many eminent scholars of his rhetoric, from Villey and Chamard to Cornilliat and Meerhoff. He humorously likens the progression of his analysis to the plot of a thriller. It is a testimony to his judicious blend of detailed scholarship and sheer verve that the term is not ill-judged. This is clearly a volume for specialists, not students. It will provide not only a useful companion to our trusted volumes of Chamard, but also essential reading for all those working on mid-sixteenth-century French poetics and rhetoric. Oxford Brookes University Valerie Worth-Stylianou Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion. By Michael Moriarty. Ox? ford: Oxford University Press. 2003. xiv + 27ipp. ?53. ISBN0-19-926146-6. Michael Moriarty follows a meticulous survey of previous scholarship on theology and history with chapters on 'Descartes' forma future' (pp. 60-99), 'Pascal* s Critique of Experience' (pp. 100-50), and Malebranche: 'What is falsely called experience' (pp. 151-49). In analysing suspicion he sedulously avoids attributing a modern under? standing of the self to his three authors. Conscientia in Descartes is set within the scholastic context of the rational soul's knowledge of itself which subsumes moral responsibility, requiring the reflexive and reflecting cogito (pp. 59-65), which adumbrates Malebranche's link between meta? physics and ethics. In Cartesian dualism the transparency of the mind, far from being a given, presupposes sifting of many commonsensical objections (pp. 65-70). Descartes uses spontaneous experience to affirmthe soul-body union, promoting well-modulated passions, which encompass formulated and unvoiced judgements. Some, notably honour, may unconsciously serve invaluable social ends. When tracing the repugnance towards painful truths about the self which constitutes a leitmotif of seventeenth-century reflection, all three authors decry prejudices engendered by imagination and conditioning. Although men are presented as tenants of a rational divine God, the ultimate guarantor of Cartesian truth, inadequate weighting is given to Descartes's magnificent ontological argument, and Pascal's incisive reprimand in the 'chiquenaude' fragment (Pensees, 1001, ed. by Lafuma). 814 Reviews Although Moriarty devotes pp. 102-21 to imagination in Pascal, he etiolates the tensions woven between social bonds based on forceand imagination and the ferocious onslaught against natural justice (pp. 128-29), neglecting Pascal's ironic accolade of the 'opinionsdu peuple saines' (Pensees, 101, ed. by Lafuma), whichcelebrates human gumption in establishing laws based on indisputable external signs, and devising the 'regle des partis'. This rule corroborates our rationality when we stake our all on uncertainty both in...

China's First Systematic Account of Rhetoric: An introduction to Chen Kui's Wen Ze

Abstract Chen Kui published theWen Ze, The Rules of Writing) in 1170. Chinese scholars commonly describe this as the first systematic account of Chinese rhetoric. This paper will place the Wen Ze in its historical and rhetorical context and provide a translation and discussion of key extracts from the book. In providing a summary of the key points of The Rules of Writing, this paper presents the main principles of Chinese composition and rhetoric as laid out by Chen Kui. It will also provide evidence that rhetorical styles are a product of their times. Like fashions, they flourish and fade and then flourish again.

Ordering Rhetorical Contexts with Burke's Terms for Order

Bronislaw Malinowski introduces influential ideas of context to rhetoric when he rejects texts and etymology to argue that meaning is determined by tangible, embodied circumstances. I turn to ancient texts and Kenneth Burke's reading of Malinowski to argue that we order—and are ordered by—rhetorical contexts that are composed of hierarchical designs, oppositional ideas, and material bodies.

Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.

Writers’ mental representations of the intended audience and of the rhetorical purpose for writing and the strategies that they employed when they composed

This paper studies the composing strategies employed by four advanced L2 writers when they wrote in an academic setting and the rhetorical context of composing, i.e. their mental representations of the intended audience and of the rhetorical purpose for writing. Four student-teachers majoring in English and attending a postgraduate teacher education programme wrote an assignment in separate writing sessions that were videotaped. The writers were asked to think aloud, i.e. verbalize all the thoughts that went through their minds when they wrote. The think-aloud protocols were transcribed, coded and analyzed in conjunction with the plans and drafts that were produced in the writing sessions. In the follow-up interviews, the writers were asked questions on their mental representations of the intended audience and of the rhetorical purpose for writing. The findings suggested that the writers’ mental representations of the intended audience and of the rhetorical purpose for performing the writing task appeared to have a correspondence with the ways that composing strategies were employed. In the process of composing, the writers made use of a broad range of strategies: cognitive, metacognitive and affective. Although they seemed to use a largely similar range of composing strategies, there was a significant difference in the extent to which different writers made use of these strategies. Different writers also used the same or similar strategies to serve different purposes at different junctures of the composing process.

Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.

The Bohemian Paradox: My Antonia and Popular Images of Czech Immigrants

In 1893, a letter written by Charles H. Slama of Madison, Wisconsin, appeared in Bohemian Voice, a newspaper serving mostly Czech immigrant and Czech American readers across the nation. Regarding other newspapers' disparaging portrayals of Czechs (then usually called Bohemians), Slama writes, The number of people can really form any judgment as to the comparative merits of Bohemia and Bohemian people might be counted on one's fingers. On the other hand, the number of people make the most confident assertions about us, and fancy they are especially qualified to speak, is almost unascertainable (14). Judgments and assertions about Czechs, especially Czech immigrants in the US, continued to be made by the American popular press well into the first decades of the twentieth century. By 1918, when Willa Cather added her voice to this subject with her novel My Antonia, specific stereotypes of Czech immigrants had developed. When placed within its historical and rhetorical context, and approached as part of this body of discourse, My Antonia can be seen as Cather's response to and reshaping of the popular image of Czech immigrants. Czech immigrants appear to had special appeal for Cather since characters identified with this group appear regularly in her fiction about the plains: along with those in My Antonia are the title characters of Peter (1892), her first published story; The Bohemian Girl (1912); and Neighbor Rosicky (1930). While O Pioneers (1913) focuses on the Swedish Bergsons, their Czech neighbors are given prominence, too. No doubt, Cather's interest in such characters stems from her familiarity with the actual Czech immigrants she encountered during her years in Nebraska. Annie Sadilek, for instance, is regularly named as the author's model for Antonia Shimerda. This familiarity might spurred her to revise the images drawn by other writers and to create one that accorded with her personal understanding of this group. Furthermore, the traits ascribed to Czech immigrants in popular discourse included a determined resistance to assimilation, and this characteristic fits well with Cather's vision of the United States as a nation rich in cultural diversity. In a 1924 interview, she says that immigrants have come here to live in the sense that they lived in the Old World, and if they were let alone their lives might turn into the of their homeland. However, the agents of assimilation doggedly turn them into stupid replicas of smug American citizens. This passion for Americanizing everything and everybody is a deadly disease with us (Feld 71-72). Cuzaks in My Antonia exhibit the beautiful ways that result from preserving cultural distinctiveness. Critics already shown how Cather's novels positively portray a culturally heterogeneous nation created by the preservation of ethnic distinctiveness, a vision that opposes the homogeneous nation that would result from assimilation to the Anglo-American culture or amalgamation within the melting pot. Ann Moseley, for instance, argues that the cultural pluralist rhetoric in My Antonia becomes clear when it is compared to the social theory of Horace M. Kallen, a contemporary of Cather who maintained that each ethnic group has an inherent worth and dignity which, if retained, will strengthen and enrich American civilization (8). (See also Harvey 35-36.) In a similar way, positioning Cather with other writers contributed to the popular image of Czech immigrants reveals that she did not outright contradict this image so much as mold it into a favorable form. By presenting Czechs and their efforts to resist assimilation in a positive light, Cather made the idea of cultural pluralism more palatable to her original readers, many of whom would been hostile to such a stance. particulars of how Cather reshapes traits commonly ascribed to Czechs might easily be missed by readers nearly a century after the first appearance of My Antonia. …

A Rhetorical Perspective on the Sokal Hoax

In 1996, New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal wrote a parody of an academic article he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” This parody escaped detection by the editors and was published in the journal Social Text. Sokal outed his own hoax in the academic magazine Lingua Franca, after which prolonged discussion about the hoax took place in both academic and popular venues. This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of Sokal’s hoax, defining the hoax as a rhetorical genre, relating the Sokal hoax to some 19th-century American scientific hoaxes, explaining why this hoax inspired such intense reactions, and identifying some of the stylistic and the generic exaggerations. The impassioned discussion of this hoax may be explained by the dynamics of its rhetorical context, which drew in Social Text ’s editors as it flattered their professional vanity and revived the debate over the culture wars. But the textual dynamics of Sokal’s hoax have been largely ignored, even though closer attention to genre, style, and argument might have prevented the hoax. Rhetorical understanding thus requires attention to both texts and contexts.

Relocating Praise: Literary Modalities and Rhetorical Contexts ed. by Alice G. den Otter

Relocating Praise: Literary Modalities and Rhetorical Contexts ed. by Alice G. den Otter

Discursive Psychology and the “New Racism”

This paper addresses a range of theoretical issues which are the topic of recent social psychological and related research concerned with the “new racism.” We critically examine examples of such research in order to explore how analyst concerns with anti-racist political activism are surreptitiously privileged in explanations of social interaction, often at the expense of and in preference to the work of examining participants' own formulations of those same activities. Such work is contrasted with an ethnomethodologically-informed, discursive psychology which seeks to the explore how participants' talk is responsively oriented to foreclosing the same sort of critique implicitly made available in new racism research as a way for speakers to account for their own and others' activities within the controversy which that same body of research seeks to settle. More specifically, we examine how the rhetorical context of controversy surrounding race and racism is imminent to the situated activities whereby speakers provide for its relevance and not, as assumed in new racism research, some independent factor affecting that interaction. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of an episode of talk recorded in a social science interview having as its topic the nature of cross-cultural contact in which the participants take up the issue of racism as a way of managing the conflicting demands with which they are confronted in accounting for their involvement as Western expatriates living in the Middle East. Throughout our analysis of these materials, the issue of racism is approached for how it features as a participant concern, raised by speakers in the course of attending to the immediate situated interactional business in which they are engaged.

The Eisenhower/Khrushchev rhetorical compact: Toward a model of cooperative public discourse

One important problem faced by public speakers is rhetorical situations characterized by a multiplicity of rhetors and audiences. The public speaker is not only speaking to the immediate audience but is also speaking to a larger audience of “rhetorical players” who will potentially respond with public statements or symbolic actions of their own. In situations involving interdependent goals, speakers can potentially “hold each other hostage” by their ability to change the rhetorical context. Based on this dynamic, I argue that rhetors have incentive to engage in subtle rhetorical patterns of accommodation. Public speakers establish rhetorical process rules to coordinate action and meaning. The phenomenon of coordinated rhetorical rules is referred to as a “rhetorical compact.” An interpretive case study involving Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nikita S. Khrushchev illustrates the interactive aspect of rhetorical compacts and public policy. This analysis concludes that identification of compacts can help explain patterns of rhetoric and policy that would otherwise remain partially unexplained or overlooked.

Serpents and Sheep: The Harriman Expedition, Alaska, and the Metaphoric Reconstruction of American Wilderness

This article examines one mechanism for the radical change in public perception of wilderness. The published papers of the Harriman Expedition, a scientific expedition at the end of the nineteenth century, are used to illustrate a process that I call "metaphoric reconstruction." I argue that conceptual metaphors are one of the tools through which texts and rhetorical contexts can be mutually transformative.

Why technology matters to writing: A cyberwriter’s tale

Technology does indeed matter to writing—and in significant ways. But how it matters can vary, depending on the particular technology, the habits and attitudes of the individual writer, and the context of learning and use. Here I employ a personal narrative (“a cyberwriter’s tale”) to track my development as a writer over time—from handwriting to typewriting to cyberwriting—and to show how each new writing technology influenced my practices and products. I argue finally for a cyborgian, posthumanist view of writing technologies. Such a view does not isolate the technological tool as an abstracted machine apart from human use, but insists on defining technology as use—as the human and machine working in concert (joined at the interface) and writing in a particular social, political, and rhetorical context.

Simple Signals for Complex Rhetorics: On Rhetorical Analysis with Rich-Feature Support Vector Models

Most text displays an internal coherence structure, which can be analyzed as a tree structure of relations that hold between short segments of text. We present a machinelearning governed approach to such an analysis in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Our rhetorical analyzer observes a variety of textual properties, such as cue phrases, part-of-speech information, rhetorical context and lexical chaining. A two-stage parsing algorithm uses local and global optimization to find an analysis. Decisions during parsing are driven by an ensemble of support vector classifiers. This training method allows for a non-linear separation of samples with many relevant features. We define a chain of annotation tools that profits from a new underspecified representation of rhetorical structure. Classifiers are trained on a newly introduced German language corpus, as well as on a large English one. We present evaluation data for the recognition of rhetorical relations.

Evidencing Nonstandard Feature Dynamics

Via a Speak Aloud and Write protocol methodology, this study investigated the characteristics of the wording formulation process of a select group of 7 African American students in freshman composition who claimed nonstandard features were active at least 30% to 40% of the time while they composed their papers. Control of rhetorical context was established in terms of tone (formal), purpose (to explain or argue), audience (English instructor), and the time-place context (“simultaneously” spoken-written at one sit-ting). Two Speak Aloud and Write transcripts per participant were analyzed for grammatical and “pronunciation-related” nonstandard feature dynamics in reference to consequences on the page, given the requirements of freshman composition. Findings indicate complex dynamics at work in the form of 7 feature dynamic patterns and 19 variations, with particularly marked activity in relation to a consonant cluster reduction feature and to specific verbal nonconcord features. Also, students who shared feature dynamics pattern characteristics generally shared literacy background characteristics.