Rhetorical Historiography Research Articles

Homeland :: hostland – An 11th century micro geography southeast of Arlanda Airport.

This case study is a dolly shot that eventually stops and zooms in on the small settlement area defined by the adjacent settlements Torsholma and Rolsta in the 11th century. It starts with an overview of the larger string of settlements of which Torsholma-Rolsta represents the eastern end. Secondly, it discusses the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (E-version) for the year 1025 and this analysis corroborates Bo Gräslund’s 1986 identification of Helgå in Frösunda as the sacred river referred to in medieval sources on the war between Olav den helige (Saint Olaf), Anund Jakob and Knut den store (Canute the Great). However, in this micro-geography case study, only the possible bridgehead is in focus. The relation between Knut’s army and the local families is understood to reflect an interaction between a homeland and a hostland. Originally, Frösunda and Orkesta made up the homeland. Finally, the post-1025 runic inscriptions related to this interaction are seen as fragments of a rhetorical historiography of a near past.

The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970 by Sara Hillin

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970 by Sara Hillin Jennifer Keohane Sara Hillin, The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. 181 pp. ISBN: 9781498551038 It is easy to see why Amelia Earhart has soared over the public memory of women in aviation. She was charismatic, committed to promoting women in flight, and left behind a trove of speeches, articles, and books to analyze. Yet, this valorization of Earhart’s accomplishments as the main story of women in aviation is exactly what Sara Hillin writes against in her new book. Instead, Hillin argues, there are a number of female aviators who were not [End Page 472] only taking to the skies against stacked odds, but writing and speaking about it too. Hillin’s project is primarily based in recovery. She seeks to add the words of the rhetors covered here to fill gaps in feminist rhetorical historiography (1). Earhart does not feature prominently in the analysis; although the 99s—a vocal and organized group of female aviators—are covered, and Earhart was their first president. Instead, Hillin focuses on lesser-known writers and flyers including Harriet Quimby, the first women licensed as a pilot in the United States and a transportation columnist for Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Other important aviators include Bessie Coleman and Willa Beatrice Brown, African American stunt pilots covered extensively in the Chicago Defender; Mary Alexander, a flying mother who threw birthday parties for her children in the air; and Jerrie Cobb, a pilot who passed all the tests to join the Mercury program but was never allowed to go to space. The book follows a loosely chronological structure, moving from the 1910s to the 1970s, and features eight analytical chapters, each of which focus on a different woman or group of women. While these women confronted a variety of obstacles in taking to the air, the driving similarity is their rhetorical acumen. As Hillin writes, “Rather than simply describing their experiences, they harnessed their rhetorical intuition to get others to act—to accept women as aviators, to train them as equals with men, and to influence the overall development of aviation and space exploration” (10). The narrative Hillin tells is not one of slow but steady progress throughout the twentieth century. In fact, in its infancy, flight had not yet been gendered masculine. As per Hillin’s telling, “there was something uniquely magic, even divine” in the fact that Harriet Quimby was taken so seriously as an expert on flying in her columns for Leslie’s (22). Indeed, like many of the women examined here, Quimby relied on her personal experience as an aviator to build her ethos, which Hillin defines as an embodied rhetoric in which “her physical self and its connection with the tool (airplane)” granted credibility (35). The world wars of the twentieth century also provide an important backdrop. Many women wrote against using the airplane as a tool for war, while others took advantage of the need for trained aviators to expand their place in the field (49). Other aviators had to negotiate the unique demands of race politics in addition to gender. African American flyer Bessie Coleman engaged in barnstorming tours and stunt flying, visual rhetorics that proved her skill, while white female aviators could skip these dangerous venues for flight because they had access to other forms of funding, training, and media outlets (62). Likewise, by the time Jerrie Cobb sought access to space, the Cold War competitive mentality had hardened space travel as solely a masculine achievement (137). To study the first few decades of women’s involvement in aviation is to see women doing painstaking and effective rhetorical work to grab and maintain a place in a field in which they have consistently excelled since its inception,” Hillin concludes (165). [End Page 473] Hillin has undertaken an impressive amount of archival research, and the sources she uses to recover the rhetorical actions of these female aviators are wide-ranging. She analyzes personal letters, news coverage, books, speeches, and press releases (6). The theoretical through-line for Hillin’s rhetorical analysis is Kenneth Burke’s pentad (11). This orients...

Introduction: This Is America

Introduction: This Is America

Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century

Remapping the historical terrain of popular learning in the U.S., Angela G. Ray and Paul Stob’s edited collection Thinking Together guides readers to attend more sensitively to the social complexity and diversity of platform culture during the long nineteenth century. In this volume, platform culture names the then-available modes of public performance and lecture, which supplied a variety of vehicles for “thinking together” – the editors’ term for “people assembling to pursue knowledge and to forge collective understanding” (Ray and Stob 2018, 1). Readers of this text will encounter the “platform” as a protean space for rhetorically (re)configuring identity and community, especially along the axes of religion, race, class, gender, and nationality. In this respect, the collection is notable for convening chapters that recover the narratives of minoritized rhetors, offering a richer historical portrait of “how people living on the margins of society managed to think together despite the many obstacles they faced” (2).Collectively and kaleidoscopically, the chapters of Thinking Together revise the record of how public rhetoric provided for popular learning during the period, both along and against the grain of social difference. For this reason, the collection would make a worthy addition to the bookshelves of specialists in U.S. rhetorical history and culture – but might be an even better addition to introductory syllabi in rhetorical historiography, offering an accessible survey of platform culture’s diverse manifestations. I particularly recommend this collection to readers seeking to place histories of popular learning in closer conversation with histories of social hierarchy and exclusion. Contributions made by Tom F. Wright (chapter 3) and Kirt H. Wilson and Kaitlyn G. Patia (chapter 4), for instance, examine the complex roles platform rhetorics played in resisting or re-inscribing nineteenth-century race science. To be sure, Thinking Together’s account of social diversity and stratification is partial, leaving much underexamined – including where disability and queer cultures are concerned. Yet this partiality doubles as an invitation for future work and can, in the classroom, be leveraged as a teaching device: “Who is missing? What would recovering them mean and require?”Perhaps surprisingly, this collection also has much to offer scholars of (social) media history and rhetoric. With its focus on the nineteenth century, Thinking Together’s explicit engagements with digital rhetorics and environments are understandably infrequent. Yet in excavating past media ecologies that supported “thinking together,” the collection could be considered a sort of rhetorical prehistory for present day social media, positioning readers to ponder continuities between nineteenth-century platform cultures and twenty-first-century social media platforms. Throughout, Thinking Together highlights how oral performances came to be remediated and recirculated in print, serving as sites for public commentary and community-building. Readers seeking to engage in (social) media archeology will be particularly pleased to find the U.S. lyceum reimagined by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray (chapter 2) as a virtual (“portable”) social environment and cultural form, recreated and reenacted in a diversity of spaces, including Civil War prisoner of war camps.Thinking Together does not promise a unified, definitive treatment of the nineteenth-century platform. Instead, it delivers something more important: This polyvocal text stresses the plurality and potency of the long nineteenth century’s popular learning ecologies, and it insists that there remains much to be learned about (and from) the period and its platform cultures. This collection represents one multidisciplinary model for thinking together about this past – and issues a call for future scholars to join this work.

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

Rhetoric In Situ

Rhetoric <i>In Situ</i>

“The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography

This article explores the rhetoric of medieval rabbi and philosopher Saadya Gaon, arguing that Saadya typifies what LuMing Mao calls the “interconnectivity” of rhetorical cultures (Mao 46). Suggesting that Saadya makes use of argumentative techniques from Greek-inspired, rationalist Islamic theologians, I show how his rhetoric challenges dominant works of rhetorical historiography by participating in three interconnected cultures: Greek, Jewish, and Islamic. Taking into account recent scholarship on Jewish rhetoric, I argue that Saadya's amalgamation of Jewish rhetorical genres alongside Greco-Islamic genres demonstrates how Jewish and Islamic rhetoric were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the article analyzes the rhetorical significance of Saadya's most famous treatise on Jewish philosophy, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, which I argue utilizes Greco-Islamic rhetorical strategies in a polemical defense of rabbinical authority. As a tenth-century writer who worked across multiple rhetorical traditions and genres, Saadya challenges the monocultural, Latin-language histories of medieval rhetoric, demonstrating the importance of investigating Arabic-language and Jewish rhetorics of the Middle Ages.

“The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography

“The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography

Recuperating John Bascom’s Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric and Contemporary Rhetorical Education

Revisionist historiographies in rhetorical studies often recuperate marginalized figures to advance scholarship on rhetorical education. I illustrate the heuristic value of recuperating mainstream figures by drawing on unexamined materials of John Bascom, whose contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory have been determined exclusively by his textbook, Philosophy of Rhetoric. I challenge such interpretations by using autobiography and institutional history to illustrate Bascom’s disdain for rhetoric and preference for philosophy. I synthesize Bascom’s publications, teaching, and administrative work while president of the University of Wisconsin to recuperate a civic philosophy of public education that integrated civic humanism with progressivism to promote collective identity and shared governance. I use Bascom’s philosophy to support rhetorical education that integrates participation and deliberation as strategies for civic engagement. This essay contributes to rhetorical historiography by demonstrating how a wider range of materials can produce more complex, compelling accounts of an individual’s contributions to theory or pedagogy.

From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity through Metadata

This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

Anxieties of Legitimacy: The Origins and Influence of the “Classicist Stance” in American Rhetoric Studies

ABSTRACTThis article describes an origin of the “classicist stance,” Nan Johnson's term for the emphasis on the classical past in American rhetoric historiography. It argues that adherence to the classical past arises from an anxiety about conducting research evident in the field in the early twentieth century, an anxiety that develops into fears about institutional legitimacy later in the century. The article closes by urging scholars of rhetoric in the modern era to embrace print modernity as their researh framework, rather than classicism.

Anxieties of Legitimacy: The Origins and Influence of the “Classicist Stance” in American Rhetoric Studies

This article describes an origin of the “classicist stance,” Nan Johnson's term for the emphasis on the classical past in American rhetoric historiography. It argues that adherence to the classical past arises from an anxiety about conducting research evident in the field in the early twentieth century, an anxiety that develops into fears about institutional legitimacy later in the century. The article closes by urging scholars of rhetoric in the modern era to embrace print modernity as their researh framework, rather than classicism.

There's No Place Like the Childcare Center: A Feminist Analysis of in the World War II Era

During World War II, government and individual industries opened childcare centers across the country to support working mothers entering the war plant. At war's end, leaders moved to close these centers, prompting great debate. This essay explores the wartime discussion and postwar debate over the WWII childcare center by analyzing how the gendered ideograph <home> was deployed in ways that both praised and blamed not only the childcare center but also working mothers. While the primary work of the essay is to mine ideographic uses of <home>, it also aims to elaborate on feminist engagements with rhetorical historiography.

Toward a Posthuman Perspective: Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies and Everyday Practices

ABSTRACTThis article considers the emergence of methodological patterns, or “sanctioned narratives,” within feminist rhetorical historiography, arguing that with just a few exceptions these patterns have anchored our work to conceptions of the woman-as-rhetor exercising deliberate, strategic agency against her world, rather than within it. While this conception has been enormously productive in redefining what “counts” in the history of rhetoric, it also constrains our attempts to pursue broader methodological projects that take as their subject the interworkings of rhetoric, power, and gender. After describing the ways that existing methodological patterns have become entrenched, this article offers one method for shifting our commitments, a feminist-materialist methodology. Influenced by theories of posthuman agency and by actor-network theory, this method can help feminist rhetoricians pursue broader conceptions of rhetoric that will allow us to intervene more effectively in the rhetorical production and transformation of gender relations and power dynamics.

Places to Stand: The Practices and Politics of Writing Histories

This article situates itself within recent calls for rhetorical studies to expand its regional and cultural scope, offering an analysis of rhetorical constitution in republican Ecuador. Identifying the unavoidable ethical problems that arise when rhetoricians travel, the article argues for a flexible, learning-focused approach to rhetorical historiography that neither abandons existing rhetorical concepts nor rests easily in the face of their limitations. In light of the new insights that emerge when Burke's constitutional theories encounter Ecuador's complicated constitutional scene, the article suggests that our understandings of how rhetoric works can be tempered—both bent and strengthened—by displacement.

Places to Stand: The Practices and Politics of Writing Histories

ABSTRACTThis article situates itself within recent calls for rhetorical studies to expand its regional and cultural scope, offering an analysis of rhetorical constitution in republican Ecuador. Identifying the unavoidable ethical problems that arise when rhetoricians travel, the article argues for a flexible, learning-focused approach to rhetorical historiography that neither abandons existing rhetorical concepts nor rests easily in the face of their limitations. In light of the new insights that emerge when Burke's constitutional theories encounter Ecuador's complicated constitutional scene, the article suggests that our understandings of how rhetoric works can be tempered—both bent and strengthened—by displacement.

Toward a Posthuman Perspective: Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies and Everyday Practices

This article considers the emergence of methodological patterns, or “sanctioned narratives,” within feminist rhetorical historiography, arguing that with just a few exceptions these patterns have anchored our work to conceptions of the woman-as-rhetor exercising deliberate, strategic agency against her world, rather than within it. While this conception has been enormously productive in redefining what “counts” in the history of rhetoric, it also constrains our attempts to pursue broader methodological projects that take as their subject the interworkings of rhetoric, power, and gender. After describing the ways that existing methodological patterns have become entrenched, this article offers one method for shifting our commitments, a feminist-materialist methodology. Influenced by theories of posthuman agency and by actor-network theory, this method can help feminist rhetoricians pursue broader conceptions of rhetoric that will allow us to intervene more effectively in the rhetorical production and transformation of gender relations and power dynamics.

Rhetorical Historiography and the Octalogs

The phenomenon of the Octalog came into being at the 1988 CCCC when James J. Murphy, with support from Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown, proposed and chaired a roundtable composed of eight distinguish...

“Grand Convergence” in the Mexican Colonial Mundane: The Matter of Introductories

“Grand Convergence” introduces Mexican colonial rhetoric by way of a short text that is partial to clerical ideology and that eclipses a rich tradition of Amerindian medical rhetoric. Noting distinctions between Burke's theory of the representative anecdote and New Historicist uses of the “detail,” it explores the suitability of the text as an introduction to Latin American rhetoric historiography. Part two of the article examines contemporary scholarship on colonial Mexican rhetoric for its reductions and deflections.

Whither Propaganda? Agonism and “The Engineering of Consent”

Randall L. Bytwerk, Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 228 pp. $59.95 (cloth), $24.95 (pap...