Rhetorical Legacy Research Articles

Sisters of secession: the unclaimed legacies of two Southern American Irish women

Mary Austin Carroll (1835–1909) and Florence Jane O'Connor (dates unknown) were both Irish American women of fervent religious belief who are unfamiliar to contemporary readers. The first objective of this piece is to introduce them and to give an account of their work. As a nun, and later a superior in the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, Mary Austin Carroll's work has sometimes been lost to her own preference for anonymity. Her literary production and importance arguably eclipse more celebrated male pro-Confederate contemporaries like Father Abram J. Ryan. For her part, Florence O'Connor's singular work, The Heroine of the Confederacy, provides critical insights into how Irish American women naturalised Catholicism in the South and reconciled it to Lost Cause remembrance. This essay attempts to place these women within the larger context of Southern Irish Americans with Confederate sympathies and argues for the lasting significance of their literary and rhetorical legacies within American Irish histories.

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.

Sarah Siddons and Her Place in Rhetorical History

Abstract Actors, who deliver the words of playwrights rather than their own, have largely been disregarded by rhetorical scholars despite the fact that the theatrical stage was one of the first arenas in which women struggled to gain public acceptance. A noteworthy public woman in this regard was Sarah Siddons, the late-eighteenth-century actor whose talent and influence led to her recognition as an exemplar of delivery in such rhetorical manuals as Gilbert Austin's Chironomia (1806) and Henry Siddons's Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1807). This article recovers Siddon's rhetorical legacy by examining her distinctive delivery style, emotional powers, and maternal performance in public spaces.

The Rhetorical Presidency of George H.W. Bush (review)

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Presidency of George H.W. Bush Kenneth S. Zagacki The Rhetorical Presidency of George H.W. Bush. Edited by Martin J. Medhurst . College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006; pp. ix + 207. $40.00. As scholars busy themselves making sense of George W. Bush's rhetorical presidency, they could easily lose sight of the current president's father and his own rhetorical legacy. Fortunately, Martin J. Medhurst will not let this happen. His latest edited book, The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush, represents a thorough, engaging rhetorical analysis of almost every aspect of the elder Bush's rhetorical activity as president of the United States. Each chapter combines standard rhetorical methods with careful archival research to provide fresh and insightful looks into the first Bush presidency. The thesis that runs throughout is that, rhetorically speaking, the Bush presidency failed largely because Bush himself not only showed "no appreciation of the role of rhetoric in the actual formulation of policy, he did not appreciate the inventional and judgmental aspects of the art" (4). When Bush entered office in January 1989, he believed that "he was no Ronald Reagan and could not hope to duplicate Reagan's role as the 'Great Communicator'" (3); and he separated politics from government, the former of which he associated with rhetoric and the latter with the more principled art of creating "broad, consensus-building activities undertaken for the common good" (10). These factors, combined with several other rhetorical "blunders" (98), made for a Bush White House incapable of effecting "prudential action in ways that were both recognized and appreciated by the public at large" (4). What were the blunders? Each succeeding chapter supplies answers to this question. Catherine L. Langford examines Bush's struggle with the "Vision Thing," at which he was rhetorically "inept" (20). The underlying difficulty was that Bush did not "create a public narrative that was simple, repetitive, familiar, and artistic" (21). Bush's narrative shortcomings revolved around his inability to identify clear enemies responsible for America's ills and an empowering "agency" that "commissioned presidential action" (32). The result was that Bush, unlike Reagan, failed "to fashion a narrative that captured the nation's attention or moved its people to action" (32). Roy Joseph investigates the "eloquent symbols and metaphors" (83) in Bush's "New World Order" speeches, arguing that although the president articulated the goals of his vision, he consistently failed to demonstrate how to achieve them or what, precisely, his "vision" was. This omission left others to define a vision for Bush, thus transposing "what could have been a unifying rhetorical idiom . . . into a free-for-all interpretative utterance" (96–97). Holly G. McIntush explores Bush's stance as "the education president" and finds his rhetoric on the subject wanting. Indeed, although the president [End Page 534] sent two major education initiatives to Congress, "his actions lacked focus and were not adequately linked to the goals set forth in 1990 or to the reasons the public was urging reform" (107). Using archival material well, McIntush examines these initiatives and the rhetorical failures associated with them—namely, that Bush did not connect his specific education proposals and their goals to improvements in the American economy. Bush's rather uneven relationship with the religious right is the subject of Amy Tilton Jones's chapter. She shows how Bush's speeches to religiously conservative audiences tried to firm up this relationship. Based on archival material of speech drafts, she analyzes problems associated with humor in religious addresses and closely examines how Bush supplied moral-religious justifications for the first Gulf War. The most informative part of this chapter deals with the 1992 Republican National Convention and the assortment of "harsh, embattled" (163) speeches delivered by the likes of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Marilyn Quayle, which, juxtaposed with Mary Fisher's oration about treating HIV victims humanely, made for an overall rhetoric "that lauded family values, morals, and inclusions but in reality . . . combined contradictions and exclusion" (165). Wynton C. Hall performs an important service by challenging political scientists who downplay or overlook the important role of rhetoric, especially when chief executives frame issues like economics. Analyzing...

Kennedy's Romantic Moon and Its Rhetorical Legacy for Space Exploration

This essay critiques John F. Kennedy's address at Rice University on the nation's space effort and its rhetorical construction of romantic, transcendent appeals designed to motivate audiences toward participating in massive and ambiguous space goals. The essay examines the influence such appeals have had on subsequent presidential and administrative space program rhetoric.

Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement (review)

356 Rhetoric & Public Affairs also presents a barrier to publicity and obviates the need for public action because, by his account, no distinct public realm exists beyond the confines of the private." The result is that Emerson is able to proclaim "with stunning self-assurance, that the truest form of participation in public life is vanishing from that life; that publicity is best accomplished by sitting at home" (186). Patterson seems too anxious to make concrete the boundary between private and public protest. As recent scholarship in the humanities has illustrated, the distinction between these realms is, at best, blurred, and these blurred boundaries have resulted in richly layered, complex interpretations of rhetorical discourse. Patterson's reading of Emerson's meditations on publicity seems too rigid, and unfair. Recent Emersonian scholarship, such as Len Gougeon's Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Georgia, 1990) and David M. Robinson's Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work (Cambridge, 1993), has convincingly demonstrated that Emerson, throughout his life, pushed publicity beyond the hearth. And while she promises to embrace questions of social and political context (7), Patterson's prose frequently removes Emerson from the din of his century; tedious discussions of Locke and Hannah Arendt privilege philosophy over context. Emerson, in places, seems disembodied from his age. The nexus of race, rights, and politics is peppered with difficult interpretive problems. Patterson's richly textured contribution to these scholarly and public conversations demonstrates that students of public discourse would benefit immeasurably from re-evaluating Emerson's rhetorical legacy in light of the racialist discourses that marked nineteenth-century America. His contributions to contemporary social thought have significant, if perhaps troubling, implications for political obligation and community in the next millennium. This is a book with which readers will want to argue. Jeffrey B. Kurtz The Pennsylvania State University Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement. By Anne Loftis. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998; pp. xii + 239. $29.95. Anne Loftis's latest work is a historical study of the depiction of labor conflicts in California during the 1930s, and operates rather effectively on an interdisciplinary border, with potential utility to scholars interested in the literature, history, rhetoric, media, and politics of the era. Witnesses to the Struggle claims that the artistic representations of the poverty and labor strife in the 1930s played a central role in public and political responses to the working class and migrant farmers. Looking back to the period of the Great Depression, Loftis writes that " [i] t is the artists who have kept alive the nation's collective memory of the turmoil that engulfed Book Reviews 357 California as well as the rest of the country at the time.... In the final analysis, it was the artists who gave history a human face"(192). For students researching labor issues during the 1930s and beyond, this text offers a thorough and insightful examination of the personal and social exigencies that produced particular discourses on the events in California. The book begins with a description of the changes in Californian farm labor in the early 1930s, when shifts in immigration combined with economic hardship to produce an enormous increase of migrant agricultural workers. The right of industrial laborers to organize and collectively bargain was just beginning to receive legal recognition with the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, but farm workers were excluded by separately enacted legislation. Loftis sets the background for her narrative with the initial efforts of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) to organize farm labor despite the lack of legal protection. In October 1933, the CAWIU launched a strike by cotton pickers that drew little media attention until violence appeared imminent. Federal and state officials stepped in to mediate the dispute, but the uproar had attracted the notice of social scientists Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor and Kerr were studying self-help cooperatives in the period before New Deal programs had been implemented, and used the events of the cotton pickers' strike as evidence of the need for such assistance. Loftis begins to paint the larger picture...

Gov. Al Smith confronts the Catholic question: The rhetorical legacy of the 1928 campaign

Critics and historians have applauded the way John Kennedy dealt with the “Catholic question”; in the 1960 presidential campaign while dismissing the efforts of Al Smith in dealing with the same issue in 1928. Smith's rhetoric, overshadowed by his election defeat, has received little critical attention. Through a close reading of texts, this essay seeks a grounded judgment of the intrinsic quality of Smith's rhetoric in order to ascertain the nature of his rhetorical legacy on the Catholic question. The analysis suggests that Smith's reluctance to discuss religion, his attribution of bigotry to those who brought it up, and his resulting impatience with the whole issue combined to undercut his persuasive efforts. Futhermoore, the very factors that hindered Smith continue to be relevant to current issues regarding religious discourse in the public sphere.

Ethnic heritage as rhetorical legacy: The plan of Delano

The Plan of Delano was a powerful persuasive document in the interrelated Chicano and farmworkers’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s. To support the thesis that this Plan's persuasive qualities are illuminated best from the perspective of its own ethnic legacy, this essay attempts to demonstrate that the Plan's Mexican‐originated generic form and Mexican‐American cultural context reveal sources of its rhetorical power and meaning. These findings provide several implications for the rhetorical criticism of ethnic discourse.

A Rhetorical Legacy for Leadership: Humor .

A Rhetorical Legacy for Leadership: Humor .

The rhetorical legacy of the black church

The legacy of the Black Church to Black oratory has been a rhetoric on non‐action, a Salvationist metaphor that has often eclipsed immediate secular goals.