Discipline Of Rhetoric Research Articles

The Rhetoric of Aristotle. An Introduction into the History of the Text with a Bilingual Edition of the Original Greek Text and the Latin Translation of Johann Theophilus Buhle

The Rhetoric of Aristotle is a fundamental work for the discipline of rhetoric, which has since antiquity a tradition of editions and translations until the contemporary time introduced in this study. Among the works of the text tradition of this treatise, the Latin translation made by the German philologist and philosopher Johan Theophile Buhle is one scholarly work of the age of Enlightenment, which is in this study contrastively edited together with the Greek original text.

In Memoriam: Lloyd Bitzer (1931–2016)

In Memoriam: Lloyd Bitzer (1931–2016)

“Created this way”: liminality, rhetorical agency, and the transformative power of constraint among gay Christian college students

ABSTRACTThis study offers liminality as an analytic tool to investigate the discursive strategies of the negotiation of oppositional identities. Interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning Christian college students reveal appeals to essentialism, labeling, and identification. Specific findings include appeals to being “created gay,” the naming of identity labels that support and resist both traditional sexual minority and religious labels, and the deployment of a gay Christian identity as evangelism. This essay explores how disciplinary rhetorics create the conditions for the emergence of rhetorical agency, allowing for a nuanced understanding of the transformative possibilities of minority sexual identity formation.

Experimenting With Imagination

Three participants from the Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence’s 2016 reading group discuss past strategies for using creativity and imagination to promote deep thinking in students and discuss how they have tried new strategies as a result of the reading group. Approaching instruction from the seemingly disparate disciplines of rhetoric, game writing, and nursing, the presenters will focus on some specific strategies borrowed from Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers (James & Brookfield, 2014). The presenters will share the results of these “experiments” in the classroom and reflect on how framing/re-framing some aspects of their pedagogy in terms of imagination towards reflection has affected their teaching.Takeaway: Attendees will participate in versions of these classroom “experiments” and be allowed to judge the effectiveness/utility of such strategies informed with hands-on experience. Presented by faculty from disparate disciplines, attendees will see firsthand the common ties for any teaching occasion where deep reflection and engagement are a goal, leaving with ideas for new or augmented activities that benefit students and provide new challenges for instructors.

Parasites, politics and public science: the promotion of biological control in Western Australia, 1900-1910.

Biological control of arthropods emerged as a scientific enterprise in the late nineteenth century and the orchard industry of California was an early centre of expertise. In 1900, as the Australian colonies prepared for federation, each had a government entomologist attached to its agriculture department. The hiring of George Compere from California by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture began a controversial chapter in the early history of biological control that was linked to a late, local popularization of acclimatization. Compere became known as the 'travelling entomologist' and for a decade brought 'parasites' of pest insects from overseas and released them in Perth. His antagonistic disciplinary rhetoric and inflated claims for the 'parasite theory' created conflict with his counterparts in the eastern states. The resulting inter-state entomological controversy was played out in the press, revealing the political use of science for institutional and even state identity. It is a story of transnational exchanges, chance discoveries and popular public science: popular because of the promise of a simple, natural solution to agricultural insect pests and because of the public nature of the disputes it generated between the experts. This microcosm contributes to the global historiography of acclimatization, biological control, scientific exposition and the professionalization of agricultural science.

Why rhetoric matters for ecology

Increasingly, scientists and funding agencies such as the US National Science Foundation are recognizing the need for better science communication and more effective broader impacts activities. Compelled to make research more relevant to public stakeholders and policy makers, researchers look for ways to gain the necessary skillset to move their science from the field and laboratory into public forums. We suggest that the ancient discipline of rhetoric provides a useful – and underutilized – path forward. Building from the fundamental connections between ecology and rhetoric and drawing from practical examples at the intersection of these two fields, we demonstrate how rhetoric can inform training in science communication for better academic writing and broader impacts, and can promote interdisciplinary and cross‐institutional collaborations that support sustainability science. Integrating rhetoric and ecology helps to address complex and pressing sustainability problems through improved understanding, cooperation, and science and policy actions.

If What We Do Matters: Motives of Research in Canadian Literature Scholarship

MY TITLE BEGINS WITH IF, as if to cast doubt on whether Canadian literature scholarship matters. I write as a sometime insider to the discipline of literary studies and the field of Canadian literature, referring to myself as one of an addressed by articles published in the field, and I have long felt strongly that it does matter. But the study I present here was motivated in part by questions posed from outside the discipline about whether or not and how literature scholarship matters. These questions come from a variety of locations, including from casually curious or skeptical outsiders--I hear them from friends wanting to know what research looks like, in English--but also from students hoping to join the field, as they wonder what they are supposed to do in their essays for their English classes. Behind their uncertainty, I hear the question, why: Why would we bother? Why does this text or that analysis matter? (1) Meanwhile, as Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli, Kit Dobson, and others have pointed out, similar questions are implied by funding bodies that seek a type of tidily instrumental project literature scholarship does not often seem to provide (Coleman and Kamboureli xv-xvii, xx, Dobson 16). Compelling versions of these questions come, too, from an adjacent scholarly field that I also inhabit: Writing In the Disciplines (WID) research (see, for instance, the work of John Swales, David R. Russell, Ken Hyland, Janet Giltrow, Natasha Artemeva, and Heather Graves or the contributors to Berkenkotter, Bhatia, and Gotti's edited collection). Scholars in this field, who are interested in describing the aims, habits of mind, and rhetorical practices characterizing research in various academic disciplines, have conducted some sustained analyses of literature scholarship (see Charles Bazerman, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor, Susan Peck MacDonald, Laura Wilder, Katja Thieme, Joanna Wolfe). They have largely pursued this project by analyzing professional texts written by literature scholars, especially the published scholarly articles that embody our research. As Margery Fee observes in a recent editorial, their inquiries into our methods of analysis and argument help make explicit what is otherwise tacit and unexplained disciplinary rhetoric (Spies in the House np)--unexplained in our professional texts and, importantly, in our classrooms (see also Wilder Rhetorical, Wolfe, Thieme, Banting Uncomfortable). The questions raised by their accounts of our work connect to the questions asked by more general audiences (friends, incoming students, funding bodies), because they too can be conceived as questions about how literature scholarship should be understood and valued: How is it supposed to matter for anyone who is not already a professional in the field? (2) I want to pursue two specific versions of that question here, each version prompted by the findings of WID research about our discipline. One is, Can literature scholarship legitimately claim to be doing knowledge-making research--and thus claim to matter in a so-called knowledge economy the same way some other disciplines can? Analysts point out, for example, how our interpretive work remains so fascinated with the individual particularities and complexities of texts and phenomena that we do not generalize in ways that would enable us to coordinate our findings with others'--hence we do not generate a body of agreed-upon scholarly knowledge (MacDonald). The critical terms that we do generate in our efforts to encapsulate precisely what we see going on in our material are observed to be upward diverging: as they get more abstract, they diverge from terms other literature scholars might use for similar phenomena rather than converging with them in agreement about what is to be studied and how it is to be defined. This divergence apparently happens because our terms are crafted to be precisely appropriate to the specificities of the material we are reading closely rather than being necessarily generalizable (MacDonald 42). …

The English teacher as interdisciplinary resource

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to combine conceptual and documentary research.Design/methodology/approach– Drawing on a range of New Zealand curriculum documents and on the history of English subject in the New Zealand context, it maps aspects of the contestation that has accompanied the development of various versions of the subject over time. It also explores ways in which the subject has always drawn on a range of primary disciplinary discourses through a process of recontextualization (Bernstein, 2000).Findings– Based on this analysis, it problematizes the conventional location of literary study within the English curriculum, arguing that this arrangement disadvantages English as an additional language (EAL) students with an interest in literature. As another plank in the argument, it argues that literary study is itself currently disadvantaged by being linked to narrowly conceived notions of textual practice and the pervasive power of high-stake assessment technologies in constructing content and pedagogy.Originality/value– A solution to both problems is offered, arguing a case for relocating literary study in an expanded Arts curriculum. The paper then goes on to draw on the concept of disciplinary literacy, to argue a case for the “reinvention” of the English teacher as a cross-disciplinary resource teaching a re-framed subject renamed “Disciplinary Rhetorics”. It concludes by discussing the implications of these two re-envisionments for English teacher identities and the construction of their professional content and pedagogical knowledge.

The visual rhetoric of climate change

A unique perspective on climate‐change graphics is provided by the discipline of rhetoric, which treats these images as arguments that configure polities in specific debates over climate change. Rhetorical approaches remind us that all climate‐change arguments are political and that their effects are contingent on the time and place of their presentation. While the research in this area is new and diverse, nevertheless, some common findings emerge: that habitual ways of visualizing climate change work against, not for, effective political action; that rhetorical choices do and should underpin technical climate graphics at fundamental levels; but ironically that nonexperts, and even some experts, perpetuate the myth that climate graphics are transparent, untransformed views of nature. Rhetorical scholarship to date suggests a few paths forward through these problems toward more just, equitable, and effective public deliberation over climate‐change policy. WIREs Clim Change 2015, 6:361–368. doi: 10.1002/wcc.342This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

Procedural Rhetoric Beyond Persuasion

Over the past several years, video game studies have benefited from attention to important tools in the discipline of rhetoric. Most notably, Ian Bogost has introduced the concept of procedural rhetoric. Although Bogost defined rhetoric primarily as persuasion, there is no such definitional harmony among rhetoricians. In this article, I explore possibilities for a rhetorical understanding of video games beyond persuasion. The 2014 iOS and Android game First Strike is an example of the repetition compulsion as a means of compensating for the perceived traumatic Real. In examining this game, I hope to show that the intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric allows a productive account of simulation and suggests a way forward beyond the impasse of contingency and structure, attending the formal aspects of trope that make certain procedures durable sites of affective investment and enjoyment.

“Uniform in Virtue”: Discipline and Reform in Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643 and 1644)

Though John Milton would claim retrospectively that his divorce tracts were written in defense of domestic liberty, they often justify their conclusions in terms of national discipline. This essay proposes that the disciplinary rhetoric used in the first and second editions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, 1644) is indicative of Milton's close engagement with contemporary London-based discussions over the settlement of ecclesiastical discipline. Each edition considers and contends with the issues being debated by the divines of the Westminster Assembly and the “Presbyterian” and “Independent” party lines emerging in contemporary printed polemic. This essay argues that Milton's first divorce tract – both versions – articulates its case in a manner acceptable to those for whom national and ecclesiastical discipline was indispensible; yet, at the same time it subtly redefines discipline's meaning by repudiating legal coercion and lauding the virtue of self-restraint as the true basis of disciplined people.

Rhetorics of motherhood

Normal.dotm0012861750SIU Press288212112.00false18 pt18 pt00falsefalsefalseBecoming a mother profoundly alters one s perception of the world, as Lindal Buchanan learned firsthand when she gave birth.Suddenly attentive to representations of mothers and mothering in advertisements, fiction, film, art, education, and politics, she became intrigued by the persuasive force of the concept of motherhood, an interest that unleashed a host of questions: How is the construct defined? How are maternal appeals crafted, presented, and performed? What do they communicate about gender and power? How do they affect women? Her quest for answers has produced Rhetorics of Motherhood, the first book-length consideration of the topic through a feminist rhetorical lens.Although both male and female rhetors employ motherhood to promote themselves and their agendas, Buchanan argues it is particularly slippery terrain for women on the one hand, affording them authority and credibility but, on the other, positioning them disadvantageously within the gendered status quo. Rhetorics of investigates that paradox by detailing the cultural construction and performance of the Mother in American public discourse, tracing its use and impact in three case studies, and by theorizing how, when, and why maternal discourses work to women s benefit or detriment. In the process, the reader encounters a fascinating array of issues including birth control, civil rights, and abortion and rhetors, ranging from Diane Nash and Margaret Sanger to Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama. As Buchanan makes clear, motherhood is a rich site for investigating the interrelationships among gender, power, and public discourse. Her latest book contributes to the discipline of rhetoric by attending to and making a convincing case for the significance of this understudied subject. With its examination of timely controversies, contemporary and historical figures, and powerful women, Rhetorics of Motherhood will appeal to a wide array of readers in rhetoric, communications, American studies, women s studies, and beyond.

(M)ANY Disciplinary Approaches

This paper investigates, from a historical perspective, the disciplinary rhetoric, practices and relations emerging through the ANY conferences, as reflected in their publications, and identifies productive lessons for evolving contemporary approaches to architecture’s discursive boundaries. From 1991 to 2000, the Anyone Corporation hosted ten ANY conferences addressing indeterminate conditions of architecture and its relation with other disciplines in the face of increasingly complex environments shaped by globalization. Anyone created a multidisciplinary, discursive space to negotiate the fluid boundaries of architecture through interactions with intra- and interdisciplinary interlocutors. The ANY conferences and publications were premised on undecidability, multidisciplinarity and cross-cultural interactions, and provide a valuable barometer of premillennial preoccupations with disciplinary constructions. Analyses employ concepts from Garry Stevens’ The Favored Circle, offering insights into operative strategies for negotiating disciplinary social relations and architecture culture.

Replying/responding to criticism in language studies

It is widely recognized that academic discourse construes not only consensus, but also debate, which can sometimes be contentious. To gain a deeper insight into the rhetoric of disagreement in language studies, this article analyzes replies/responses, a genre whose primary communicative purpose is to challenge the counterclaims raised in previous publications. To rebut criticisms of their work or of the school/theory they associate themselves with, linguists use two strategies: first, they combine the arguments supporting their position with those discrediting criticism; and second, they provide only the arguments substantiating their views. Categorization of the arguments according to the rhetorical appeals they rely on reveals that the first strategy has two realizations – basic and expanded. The basic realization pairs the arguments strengthening an author’s logos and ethos with the arguments weakening a critic’s logos. It can be expanded to include pathos appeals to emphasize an author’s adherence to and/or a critic’s flouting of the community expectations, as well as the arguments weakening a critic’s ethos. The second strategy employs all three means of persuasion to support an author’s logic, trustworthiness, and alignment with the disciplinary norms. These findings are relevant to the study of disciplinary rhetoric and advanced student training.

Königs kleine Rhetorikkunde: Überblick über die wesentlichen Aspekte und Termini der Rhetorik in Stichworten, Zitaten und Tabellen (König Roughly on Rhetoric: Overview of the Main Aspects and Termini of Rhetoric in Keywords, Quotes, and Charts)

The paper examines the main aspects and categories of the academic discipline of rhetoric, giving both various definitions and examples of practical application, and promoting finally a modern and applicable access to a rather complex subject. Therefore, it is divided in nine sections containing: antique and modern definitions of rhetoric (including its contents and aims), the five canons of production (officia oratoris), the appropriateness of speech (aptum), the rhetorical genres (genera orationis), the five canons of composition (partes orationis), the modes of persuasion, the idea of topics, argumentation and syllogisms, and finally the rhetorical devices. Each chapter combines a rough evaluation of antique and modern approaches, provides definitions and diagrams, and observes links to contemporary theories in other disciplines. The paper concludes with an outlook on both academic and practical application of rhetoric today.

The Dorothy Doctrine of Engaged Scholarship: The Rhetorical Discipline “Had It All Along”

The Dorothy Doctrine of Engaged Scholarship: The Rhetorical Discipline “Had It All Along”

Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square (review)

Reviewed by: Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square Gary S. Selby Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square. By J. Caleb Clanton. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008; pp. 161. $65.00 cloth; $26.95 paper. In a 2006 address entitled "Call to Renewal," then-senator Barack Obama called for a "serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy." Written from outside the discipline of rhetoric, J. Caleb Clanton's Religion and Democratic Citizenship provides a fascinating window on that debate as it has unfolded among political philosophers. His book critiques two dominant proposals for "how religion should factor into the American public square" (9)—the reconstructionist and the separatist proposals—and offers what he calls "an open model of the democratic public square designed to accommodate as many democratically predisposed citizens as possible, religious or not" (10). Clanton begins by highlighting the tension between two dominant urges within U.S. political life: democracy and liberalism. Democracy holds that "citizens should be free to voice their concerns, beliefs, and preferences, as they understand them in the public sphere" (1). Liberalism prevents the tyranny of the majority by requiring that governmental action be justified only on grounds that can be reasonably accepted by all of its citizens. That constraining impulse, however, poses a dilemma for people of faith. Can justifications rooted in religious convictions not shared by the entire citizenry ever play a legitimate role in public deliberation? In chapters 2 and 3, he examines the reconstructionist answer to that dilemma, embodied in the writings of Richard Rorty and Cornel West and rooted in the pragmatism of William James, which resolves the conflict by "semantically recasting religion such that it meets the epistemic demands of the community" (15). For James, that meant reducing religious faith to its practical usefulness—to the "melioristic hope" that motivated its adherents to act for the good of themselves and others. (As Clanton rightly notes, of course, robbed of [End Page 317] its metaphysical content, such "faith" bears little resemblance to the "old time religion" held by most believers.) Following James, Rorty argued that because it is a "conversation stopper," religious discourse must be interpreted symbolically in a way that makes its propositions palatable to nonreligious people. In response, Clanton questions whether "stopping the conversation as it stands" is necessarily a bad thing, since doing so may introduce into the public forum a "conversation of a different variety" (47). Indeed, he continues, "it may be the case that religious premises act to broaden the terms of the deliberation precisely by promoting deliberation—that is, another conversation—to be held about the parameters of deliberation itself" (48). West, by contrast, sees "enormous pragmatic potential" for religion in the public square, particularly in the voices of "prophetic Christianity" that bring an "urgent and compassionate critique to bear on the evils of their day" (49– 50). Before such voices can be heard, however, religion must be demythologized to make it ready for "political engagement" (50). West's religion thus provides not "theology or metaphysics" but merely "motivational potential" (51). Indeed, Clanton wonders whether West himself might be engaging in the ethically questionable practice of exploiting "the religious language of traditional believers for political purposes" (55). In chapters 4 through 6, Clanton examines the separatist response to the question of religion and the public square, represented in the political theory of John Rawls. Rawls holds that people may legitimately engage in public deliberation only in the role of "citizens" (not as "Christians"), only on matters that rightly belong to the public sphere, and most importantly, appealing only to public reasons, that is, to those "one can reasonably expect others to endorse as reasons" (68–69). The implication for religion is clear: "Religion ought to be bracketed before citizens enter the public square" (71). In response, Clanton questions not only whether such neutrality is possible within a "shared political culture [that] is struck through with disagreement" (93), but more importantly, whether it is even preferable as a regulative ideal, for four reasons. First, by demanding that religious citizens bracket their convictions before entering the public square, Rawls...

International Relations as Rhetorical Discipline: Toward (Re-)Newing Horizons

International Relations takes it all too often for granted that different scholarly sub-communities in the field are incommensurable and, therefore, that the erosion of the community of International Relations scholars is inevitable. I present a three-fold argument against this inevitability: First, International Relations is much better understood as a field of overlapping horizons than a discipline of incommensurable paradigms. Second, the most consequential overlap is epistemological. This overlap is constituted by very specific rhetorical understandings of epistemology that come remarkably close to the Aristotelian Rhetoric and Philosophical Sophistic. International Relations is a rhetorical discipline. Third, dialogue is able to seize the opportunities for communication across different horizons within and beyond International Relations—making it a lively and open discipline instead of a constellation of hermetically sealed and self-referential sub-communities.

Myopic Rhetorics: Reflecting Epistemologically and Ethically on the Demand for Relevance in Organizational and Management Research

I examine the relevance debate in organizational/management research and teaching asa disciplinary rhetoric that should be treated with a degree of caution if not skepticism. For enslavement to relevance is in danger of reducing our independence as academics—something that, from my experience of working with a consortium of practitioners, I knowthat management values. Here, however, I do not suggest resisting relationships withmanagement. On the contrary, I endorse them as a way of developing productive, ethicalresearch and learning; building sources of access for research; and enhancing teaching. Also, such relationships can supplement existing research-funding resources, although itis still necessary to retain some epistemological distance from management practicewhile engaging with it as an ethical project.

ONE MORE TIME: J. S. BACH AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRADITIONS OF RHETORIC

ABSTRACTAlthough the question of a connection between Bach’s music and the discipline of rhetoric has been raised repeatedly in the past, the proposed solutions have rarely taken into account the particular kind of rhetorical thinking prevalent in the eighteenth century. In this article, I show that a notion of rhetoric initially developed by Erasmus of Rotterdam and perpetuated in seventeenth-century writings, which focused on argumentative procedures involving variation and amplification, continued to underlie poetic and musical theory in Bach’s time. By articulating fundamental creative patterns that came to underpin a variety of disciplines, this Erasmian model can provide the starting-point for a reassessment of rhetorical techniques in Bach’s music, shifting the focus from isolated moments of affective decoration to the formal-expressive trajectories that shape the layout of whole pieces. Constituted in the interplay of compositional processes and their listening reception, these trajectories emerge as the result of the skilful arrangement of musical phrases into individual and flexible large-scale designs that often leave aside or undercut the supposed structural conventions of concerto or aria forms. The first movement of the third ‘Brandenburg Concerto’, bwv1048, serves as an example of how an awareness of these seventeenth-century rhetorical and musical legacies makes possible a thorough reconsideration of Bach’s compositional strategies.