Rhetorical Modes Research Articles

Rhetoric Is Dead? The Fear of Stasis Behind Post-Truth Rhetoric

ABSTRACT Why does post-truth discourse feel true? This article argues that post-truth fears the death of rhetoric, rather than truth, and traces that fear to the voluminous, rapid, and intense production of stasis on social media. Social media enable and weaponize the production of stasis, and that production generates affects more aligned with death than life (stagnation, hopelessness) that explain why post-truth feels true. These fears and their concomitant hopes constitute an affective economy also present in philosophy’s predominant images of rhetoric. Some images picture rhetoric as movement, whereas others emphasize rhetoric’s capacity to secure the status quo. Social media beckon a supplementary image—a vortex—in which rhetorical movement functions to produce standstill. This image suggests the need to consider affects generated by rhetorical processes as much as from texts. Post-truth’s affective economy also drives stasis production generally, and scholars should attend to the affective economies driving various rhetorical modes.

The Hand that Touched Troy: Using Maniculae in Latin and French Manuscripts (Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Guido delle Colonne’s Historia and their Respective Prose Versions)

Abstract In Auch, BM, 10, more than 120 maniculae, or manicules, touch the text of the Historia destructionis Troiae by Guido delle Colonne with their short or disproportionately long fingers. These maniculae are accompanied by brackets, notae, various remarks. They testify to an active reading of the work, which brushes against the writing as closely as possible, signalling and selecting passages, sometimes simply pointing out, sometimes recopying, summarizing, or commenting. This practice, which was by no means specific to the Trojan material, is far more apparent in manuscripts of the Latin work compared to those of its French source (Benoît de Sainte-Maure) and in the French prose versions that stem directly from it. By examining manuscripts of both the Latin and French traditions, and while also taking into account the methodological biases that this approach implies, this article interprets the presence of reading marks (maniculae, underlining, notes) in Trojan texts. I retrace various types of reading, which include character-focused, historical, moral or rhetorical modes of reading. I demonstrate that specific readerly profiles emerge, and more specifically, that such marks of reading turn out to be topical teaching tools or otherwise present a more subjective interaction with the textual matter. In short, I examine how these hands touching the words might inform our understanding of the reception of Troy during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Rhetoric for Crowds

Gustave Le Bon’s eminent work The Crowd is considered as one of the fundamental works in mass psychology. Concurrently, the importance of this work and the impact it had on communication practices has been recently recognized by some of the scholars. While The Crowd primarily places focus on meticulous description of origin and psychological condition of the crowd, this paper suggests that, among others, Le Bon uses psychological discourse to define rhetorical precept that can be used as an agency for eliciting such condition. It is the purpose of this paper to extract and present the guidelines suggested by Le Bon in his work for mass oratory and corroborate it with apposite rhetorical theory in order to lend credibility to this thesis. Through broader treatment of rhetorical modes of pathos (state and language that induces it), orator, oration, and kairos (the right moment), with other hitherto rhetorical and linguistic insights, Le Bon constitutes activation means for evoking the psychological phenomena of the crowd. This paper represents Le Bon’s explicit and implicit rhetorical instructions in The Crowd by constructing the rhetorical model and indicating that his scholarly contribution was rhetorical as was psychological, suggesting consideration of his inclusion in the history of rhetoric and his contribution to the development of contemporary communication practices. This paper represents an interdisciplinary rhetorical model that engages the field of interest of various scientific disciplines, such as linguistics, rhetoric, communicology, public relations, and their subbranches.

Are Zhuzi contentious? A rhetorical investigation of speech/word radicals in ancient Chinese texts

Abstract In communication, rhetors are inclined to employ contentious rhetorical modes designed to win or compete. Consequently, noncontentious rhetorical modes, such as invitational rhetoric, are underappreciated. This study fosters a better understanding of the rationale and possibility of noncontentious rhetorical modes rooted in texts by traditional Chinese intellectuals. We identify, classify, and interpret indigenous terms identified with speech/word radicals in nine Chinese philosophical classics across five major schools of thought in ancient China using a corpus-driven approach and key concepts of rhetorical studies to delineate the pattern, components, and modes of ancient Chinese rhetoric. The results show that (1) characters with speech/word radicals in ancient Chinese texts follow a pattern between rank and frequency; (2) basic components of rhetorical acts in ancient China can be described based on these terms, and characteristic rhetorical components are identified upon similarities and differences among five schools of thought; and (3) studying rhetorical modes of ancient Chinese rhetoric with speech/word radicals reveals that intellectuals in ancient China adopted both the contentious modes and the noncontentious modes of rhetoric. This study also demonstrates the possibility of studying semantic radicals in texts through digital methods to delineate ancient Chinese rhetoric.

Review of "Writing in the Clouds: Inventing and Composing in Internetworked Writing Spaces by John Logie," Logie, J. (2021). Writing in the clouds: Inventing and composing in internetworked writing spaces. Parlor Press.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the new AI chatbot application, ChatGPT, I wonder how Logie would seek to include this new technology in his work. I ponder this because, throughout the book, Logie presents compelling evidence for why the concepts of invention, composition, and internetworked writing should be embraced and not feared. While some denounce the application and take to social media to disparage the possible negative impact on students, creativity, and composition, ChatGPT, I believe Logie would argue, would be a powerful tool we can implement to become "composers." He believes that through cloud computing services we are now more apt to collaborate, use, remix, and create rhetorical modes that extend far beyond the formulaic argument, therefore we are composers. So, Logie applies the idea of a composer as someone who is a "prosumer" (Toffler). This composer is media literate and transforms traditional rhetorical canons into multimodal compositions such as memes, Google Docs, and digital collages. However, his overarching argument is that internetworked writing tools have democratized writing through that same offering of innovative outlets. His book is arranged in a way that walks the reader through this argument.

Envisioning New Modes of Solidarity: Climate Change, Kinship, and the Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

ABSTRACT: Experimental in form with a narrative animated by chance and the uncanny in ways that prompt incredulity, Gun Island (2019) can be read as Amitav Ghosh's endeavor to write a compelling work of fiction centered on climate change that provokes its readers into action; this is just the challenge he had posed to writers in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017). There, Ghosh argued that in order to effect a change in policy and mindsets there is an urgent need to write in fresh new rhetorical modes that strategically mobilize the logic of dreams, the uncanny, and myth, rather than cold science and reason, which have failed to convey the urgency of the climate catastrophe. Ghosh argues that we have taken refuge in paranoia rather than courage and faith that climate change can indeed be reversed, else why would we be so paralyzed by a deadly fatalism in the face of seemingly apocalyptic climate change? Utopian in impulse, Gun Island presents us with new aesthetic and epistemological modes, deploying the uncanny and the magical to provoke new insights about climate change and to re-vision new alliances between the precariat—refugees, migrant workers—and the well-meaning bourgeoisie, engendered by a powerful sense of the wonder of the natural world. In effect, Gun Island gestures to new collectivities and argues for an alternative vision of multi-species eco-justice, where human exceptionalism is not the norm.

Envisioning New Modes of Solidarity: Climate Change, Kinship, and the Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

ABSTRACT: Experimental in form with a narrative animated by chance and the uncanny in ways that prompt incredulity, Gun Island (2019) can be read as Amitav Ghosh's endeavor to write a compelling work of fiction centered on climate change that provokes its readers into action; this is just the challenge he had posed to writers in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017). There, Ghosh argued that in order to effect a change in policy and mindsets there is an urgent need to write in fresh new rhetorical modes that strategically mobilize the logic of dreams, the uncanny, and myth, rather than cold science and reason, which have failed to convey the urgency of the climate catastrophe. Ghosh argues that we have taken refuge in paranoia rather than courage and faith that climate change can indeed be reversed, else why would we be so paralyzed by a deadly fatalism in the face of seemingly apocalyptic climate change? Utopian in impulse, Gun Island presents us with new aesthetic and epistemological modes, deploying the uncanny and the magical to provoke new insights about climate change and to re-vision new alliances between the precariat—refugees, migrant workers—and the well-meaning bourgeoisie, engendered by a powerful sense of the wonder of the natural world. In effect, Gun Island gestures to new collectivities and argues for an alternative vision of multi-species eco-justice, where human exceptionalism is not the norm.

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference

Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference

Al-nuzuh: Displacement as Keyword

Abstract In 2022, more than half of Syria’s population have been displaced as they escaped from the destruction of their homes and livelihoods, forced resettlement, terror and overall defeat. This article focuses on the keyword al-nuzuh (displacement). It explores how al-nuzuh generates new representational codes for Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian experiences concerning the politics of displacement and an accumulated sense of loss. These codes encompass the material hardships of displacement but also make visible Syrians’ and Syrian-Palestinians’ affective, social, and existential experiences of precarity and abandonment. In this sense, my explanation of al-nuzuh departs from humanitarian and conflict management discourses to center on the perspectives of those who feel defeated in Syria and its diaspora. The article explores cultural production by Syrians and Syrian-Palestinians and how they relate to new forms of memory and collectivity about uprooting and defeat. These forms reject existing rhetorical modes of depicting mass displacement to re-write the connections between the contemporary destruction of social worlds in Syria and earlier in the former and Palestine since 1948.

Freedom As and Against Democracy

Freedom As and Against Democracy

The Death of Others. On the Narrative Rhetoric of Neoliberal Thanatopolitics

Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) are deeply controversial topics both within and beyond disability studies, involving issues of structural ableism, discrimination, and the right to self-determination. A common defence of the legalization of PAS, as distinct from euthanasia, rests on the right of an individual to freely choose when to end one's life. This essay makes an intervention in this debate by examining the rhetoric of media and cultural narratives that directly and indirectly address the issue of PAS and autonomous choice. Considering these narratives from a biopolitical point of view, I argue that contemporary thanatopolitical narratives draw on a particular rhetorical mode, known as "parrhesiastic rhetoric" or anti-rhetoric. This mode helps frame the testimony of extremely vulnerable individuals as a supremely credible argument in favor of the legalization of PAS. Moreover, it engenders sympathy rather than identification with these narrative subjects, ensuring that the death that is being justified remains at a distance from the reader, safely positioned as the death of others. I further argue that this narrative rhetoric supports a particular, neoliberal conception of autonomy, in which individual subjects are dynamic, rational and self-directing. In neoliberal thanatos political discourse, the choice to die is seen as fundamentally an outcome of individual, informed decision-making. Against this atomistic framework, I deploy the analyses of biopolitical disability studies to contribute to a better understanding of the historical, socio-economic, cultural, and rhetorical forces that shape contemporary debates over euthanasia and PAS.

'Well, That’s Just My Opinion': The Principle of Expression and the Public Debate

The public debate is commonly criticised for lacking deliberation. Therefore, I argue, we need a better understanding of the rhetorical modes occurring instead of deliberation. By examining the interaction in a particularly expressive arena for public debate, namely public comment fields on Facebook, I suggest that the term 'principle of expression' to describe a discursive ideal that directly counteracts the ideal of deliberative disagreement by favouring subjective expression over reason-giving. According to this ideal, the public debate should not primarily play out as an exchange of opinions but, instead, accommodate authentic displays of opinion. Moreover, the beliefs and opinions voiced in the public debate are seen as purely expressive: they arise out of the individual's inviolable interiority and individuality and concern not the general but the particular. Thus, argumentation is not required, and criticism is unwarranted. In the article, I explicate the 'principle of expression' and discuss its implications for the democratic debate. In doing so, I offer a way to describe, interpret and critically evaluate instances of public debate where deliberative justification and contestation is undermined by subjective expression.

Medical Law and Rhetorical Modes of its Presentation in an Institutional Discourse: An Issue Statement

As a result of rhetoric studies development in a specific medicine and healthcare field of interaction, scholars determined the grounds based on which rhetoric of law and medicine is singled out as a subfield of rhetoric. While medicine rhetoric is more focused on the rhetoric of science, the rhetoric analysis of substantive areas of medical law and healthcare prove that application of medicine rhetoric methodology to the areas of medical law results in dehumanization of the subjects of medical law; state healthcare policy implementation is perceived by affected communities as marketization of a national healthcare system; changes in medical law doctrines result in ethical shifts. The authors conclude that development of technologies in general and medical technologies in particular, public access to medical investigations’ results and inception of bioethics have resulted in the situation when the subjects of medical law are required to develop new approaches to communication with the audiences (or affected communities) based on rhetorical concepts.

Gatekeeping EpiSTEMic territories: Disciplinary requirements in Engineering and Natural Sciences undergraduate admissions interviews at the University of Cambridge

This article explores the gatekeeping practices involved in undergraduate admissions interviews comprising two “STEM” disciplines, Engineering and the Natural Sciences, at the University of Cambridge. It finds that the processes of inclusion and exclusion are not, unlike other gatekeeping encounters, determined primarily by rhetorical modes of self-presentation. They are instead determined by candidates’ ability to engage with and complete a series of problem sets that embed the discipline-specific epistemic and interactional requirements that comprise each discipline's “epistemic territory” (Heritage 2013). How candidates accomplish this goal is explored in each of the relevant disciplines, and contrasted with the requirements of non-STEM admissions interviews.

Enregistering “gender ideology”

AbstractMobilizations against gender equality and sexual diversity have gained political traction globally despite their hyperbolic modes of action and conspiracist rhetoric. These anti-gender campaigns rally around “gender ideology,” a trope used to anathemize feminist and LGBTQIA+ activism/scholarship. This paper argues that anti-genderism is a register – a conventionalized aggregate of expressive forms and enactable person-types – of which “gender ideology” is the most famous shibboleth. The paper shows how inchoate collections of words, modes of action, and images of people (i.e. signs) have been enregistered into the cohesive but heterogeneous whole of anti-genderism through semiotic processes of clasping, relaying, and grafting (Gal 2018;2019). The paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of anti-genderism to understand the challenges it poses to the enfranchisement of women, queer, trans, and nonbinary people.

In-groups, out-groups, and comic synchrony in Bo Burnham’s Make Happy (2016)

Examining Bo Burnham’s stand-up comedy special, Make Happy (2016), this article proposes the concept of comic synchrony, a mode of discourse used to speak both ironically and sincerely at once. Initially, audiences read Burnham’s utterances as wholly ironic or sincere depending upon their membership in an in-group or out-group. Comic synchrony occurs through the layering of concurrent discourse communities that complicate the use of shared rhetorical modes between speaker and interpreter. I argue that audience membership in coexisting and permeable discursive circles catalyses audience evolution so they come to understand each of the Burnham’s utterances as ironic and sincere simultaneously. Through this model, the comedian levels biting critique toward the assembled audience and, more broadly, contrived performance—meaning each attack and not meaning it at the same time. The result is a rhetorical configuration that interrogates the ambivalent relationship between irony and sincerity, emphasizing the contradictory and conflicting experience of acting out one’s life for an audience.

How scientific concept develops: Languaging in collaborative writing tasks

This qualitative case study explored the extent to which learners' L2 writing concepts changed across different collaborative writing tasks, and how languaging helped learners make meaning between scientific and spontaneous concepts. Four first-year MA students from a Chinese university formed a study group and engaged in collaborative writing tasks as required by an Academic English Reading and Writing course. Multiple sources of data were collected, including audio-taped group discussions, group writings, individual reflections, and course-related documents. Data analysis demonstrated the microgenetic evolving trajectories of the rhetorical modes of “maintaining the flow of information”. The participants progressed from spontaneous knowledge of those concepts to a scientific system through languaging about a text containing these conceptual features. Learners' conscious usage of scientific terms, constant revisiting to their prior knowledge, and critical reading of the academic text highlight the mediating role of languaging in empowering the dynamic interaction between scientific reasoning and spontaneous thinking. This study suggests that the integration of stylistic analysis tasks, peer collaboration, and rhetorical concepts may facilitate the transformation of students’ thinking patterns as well as the development of their L2 academic literacies.

Protest to Podium: Teaching argumentation to advance advocacy from social media to city hall

Online activism is a space of opportunity for students to encounter social justice issues, explore the possibilities of visual rhetoric, practice persuasive speaking skills, and actively contribute to the momentum of social movements. At the same time, digital activism raises concerns about slacktivism, limiting the necessary on-the-ground mobilization that turns the momentum of these movements into structural change. Protest to Podium meets this concern by merging digital activism, photojournalism, and public speaking, transforming the classroom into a space to engage with current social justice issues through the practice of persuasive speech. After being assigned a buzzworthy protest sign that has been photographed and posted on social media, students work to expound the argument alluded to on the sign and then role-play as constituents at a mock city hall hearing, presenting a persuasive speech to advance their cause. This experience encourages students to understand themselves as active members in the democratic process—virtually and materially—while appreciating evolving modes of activism and rhetoric. Courses Public Speaking, Visual Rhetoric, Social Movements, Advocacy, Argumentation. Objectives This activity will enable student to: (1) enact critical citizenship by interrogating issues of power and oppression from diverse perspectives; (2) demonstrate good research practices and informed media engagement; (3) construct and defend a sound argument using logic, reasoning, and persuasive argumentation strategies; and (4) assess the impact of rhetorical strategies in digital and visual communication for advocacy.

An Analysis of Infographics and Implications for L2 Writing Education

The purpose of this study is to analyze infographics that deliver information and messages with images and text and have practical potentials for L2 writing pedagogy. It is a qualitative text analysis that delves deeper into the limited number of infographics, unveiling their coherent structures and elements cohesively connected to one another. Two infographics selected for this study represent the rhetorical genres of argument and explanation. This study showed the results of in-depth examinations on two infographics, and its examinations involved the rhetorical mode, the layout structure, verbal and non-verbal elements, and rhetorical relations. Especially, the rhetorical relations of each infographic were identified with the use of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). It found that the two infographics demonstrated their unique and coherent structure, signifying a variety of rhetorical relations between images and texts, as well as between texts. (Kyungil University)