Rhetorical Position Research Articles

Responsibility and Restitution in the Freedman's Bank Crisis

The Freedman's Savings Bank, founded in 1865, was established with the express purpose of providing safe banking access for newly freed black Americans. Despite a charter dedicated to low-risk banking, the boot-strap mythology expounded by Congress was undermined by rampant fraud. Nine years after its founding, the Bank folded, swallowing 1.2 million dollars in deposits (approximately 29.6 million today) spread among roughly 61,000 individuals. The Freedman's Bank offers policy makers and social justice advocates an under-explored opportunity. Despite the near universal recognition that the fault for the institution's collapse lies with Federal mismanagement, a majority of the deposits were never compensated. Both the power to restitute and the culpability rest with the same party. Further, the record keeping of the bank ensures reasonably clean lines of inheritance for compensation. Combined these factors make a return of Freedman's Savings deposits politically viable in the rhetoric of contemporary America. This article provides the historical and data research necessary to arm policy makers in the restitution of the victim's deposits. It is not the intention of this policy to supplant the more ambitious effort of reparations, but instead to build a rhetorical position squarely within the liberalist market tradition, which also mitigates harm.

The relevance of Derrida’s translation: Mercy and ethos

ABSTRACT This study examines Derrida’s rhetorical ethos in his 1998 lecture, ‘Qu-est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ [What is a ‘relevant’ translation?], given before an audience of French literary translators from the ATLAS association. This lecture provides a gloss, informed by Derrida’s seminars on forgiveness, on his partial translation of Portia’s lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Although Derrida’s translation turns on the rendering of ‘seasons’ as relève, his overtly rhetorical positioning in this lecture foregrounds the homonymic pair mercy/merci as a primary ‘relevant’. As a result, Derrida’s performative statements of gratitude and appeals for mercy may be read as speech acts that, while simultaneously evoking and repudiating the association of translation and conversion activated in the translation of these lines, also conjure his specular être-juif. As a result, rather than simply giving a public lecture on an intimate philosophical translation practice, in ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ Derrida presents a rhetorical ethos that embeds translation, relevance, and mercy in a personally-inflected public reflection on the ‘Jewish Question’ and its very real historical consequences.

Engagement of Educators in Private Family Business Schools: The Role of a Healthy Leadership Environment

Educators play a crucial role in youth preparation, education, work, and life. They manage classroom environments, engage learners, and act as leaders. The public education system in South Africa is facing a crisis, with private family business schools (PFBSs) emerging. Educators in South Africa face challenges in youth preparation, education, work, and life, requiring a healthy leadership environment to manage classroom environments and engage learners. Thus, a healthy leadership environment is essential for educators to feel involved in their work. However, low employee engagement levels can lead to economic challenges such as unemployment, poverty, and inequality, exacerbated by illiteracy. This paper summarises the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on the issue of the significance of apt leadership for employee engagement. The aim of the paper was to examine the extent to which leadership predicts levels of engagement of educators in private family business schools. The relevance of this scientific study is that it gives key information to leaders in private family business schools on how leadership is paramount for educators to be engaged. The investigation of the topic in this study is carried out in the following logical sequence: Introduction, literature review, methodology, data analysis and results, discussion, recommendations, conclusion, limitations, future research, acknowledgements and research funding and references. The study followed an explanatory, non-experimental research design using a positivist research paradigm and approached this study from a unique axiology, ontology, epistemology, technique, and rhetorical stance that set the tone for ontological, epistemological, methodological, axiological, and rhetorical positions. Using a census sampling technique, data was collected using structured, self-administered, emailed, and drop-off questionnaires. This study’s hypothesis was tested using appropriate inferential statistics. Non-parametric analysis techniques were used to test the research hypothesis. The research empirically confirms and theoretically proves that leadership predicts engagement levels of educators in PFBSs. The results of the study can be helpful to leaders in private family business schools in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa and other regions of the world.

Pure to purpose pipeline: socializing purity in white women’s international aid work

ABSTRACT Purity Culture’s rhetorical positioning of those socialized as young, White women of good and innocent sexual objects created somatic experiences of traumatic shame and dissociation for those inhabiting this location. This experience is inextricably linked to the affective responses that produced compulsive international aid involvement as attempts to maintain the role of young, White womanhood within Christian Nationalism.

Five Decades of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Time to Pass the Baton to the UN Security Council?

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) came into force in 1970. After renouncing its nuclear weapons programme, South Africa became a party to the NPT in 1991. The NPT is the principal international instrument aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. The NPT has generated various other treaties with similar aims, which, together with the NPT, constitute the ‘nuclear non-proliferation regime’. The NPT has, for various reasons, not been a success. Whether the NPT has achieved nuclear non-proliferation is a moot point–a concept which implies nuclear disarmament. For example, there is evidence of a network of covert operations marketing nuclear technology; some non-NPT states have clandestinely embarked on nuclear weapons programmes, and some NPT states have threatened to adopt a policy of actual or pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons even against non-nuclear weapons states for its deterrent value. Alarm bells are ringing regarding the interpretation of ‘peaceful’ and ‘non-peaceful’ uses of nuclear energy. Despite the NPT, nothing prohibits the testing and refinement of existing nuclear weapons technology. Certain questions need to be answered. Has the NPT not become an instrument of rhetorical posturing by the five major nuclear weapon states–the ‘Club of Five’? Why has none of the Club of Five given their nuclear weapons up? Where do the Club of Five get the moral authority to declare that introducing new members on the Club is unacceptable? Instead of concentrating on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons as the NPT does, should there not rather be an emphasis on the total prohibition of all nuclear weapons? It is submitted that a more active role for the UN in nuclear non-proliferation issues be considered. All UN Secretaries-General have made nuclear non-proliferation one of their top priorities. Kofi Annan concluded that the NPT was the victim of insufficient progress in not only nuclear non-proliferation but also nuclear disarmament and that the world was sleepwalking towards a nuclear disaster. The basis for greater involvement of the UN Security Council in nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament is to be found in the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Statute of the NPT, the UN Charter and in Security Council Relations 1540 of 2004 and 1929 of 2010. The argument is put forward that as the Security Council has the legal authority to determine threats to the peace or acts of aggression and make recommendations or decide what measures shall be taken regarding it, utilising that body may be a more meaningful route to follow than the NPT which appears to have reached its sell-by date.

Vilda pojkar, värde och varaktighet

“Wild Boys, Value, and Longevity. Literary Value and Valuation in the Cases Mälarpirater by Sigfrid Siwertz and The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings” The valuation of literature, authorships, and individual texts ripples through time and space like waves. This pilot study which initiates a more extensive project on value considers Mälarpirater by Sigfrid Siwertz (1911) and The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings (1938) and traces the literary valuation of these award-winning texts, usually seen as classic youth novels about wild boys. The authors were at approximately the same stage of their authorial life cycles at the time of publication, and both have been subject to major renegotiations in terms of value, but they are worlds apart when it comes to rhetorical position and style. The article draws up an inventory of the actors and value-creating acts in the valuation process, and discusses similarities and differences between two works that belong to such divergent contexts as the Swedish and the American literary arenas. Conceptually, our readings draw on ideas from Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams and operationalise a combination of these in relation to literary value. In the comparative analysis, we apply categories of value from previous Swedish literary research: style and form, knowledge, emotional, social, and economic values. The life cycles of the two authorships provide numerous examples of grounds for upward valuation and devaluation. The classification of Mälarpirater and The Yearling as youth novels, not least based on paratextual aspects, proves to be significant. Both Siwertz and Rawlings are more or less forgotten as authors today, but these works survived much longer than the authorships themselves.

Franz Lehár's Friederike as Weimar Middlebrow Culture

AbstractFranz Lehár's 1928 Berlin operetta Friederike boasts an unusual subject: a romantic incident in the early life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Weimar Berlin is usually considered as a haven for experimentation between high and low culture, a bifurcated view which has dominated German studies, but in this article I argue that Friederike is best considered as an example of the middlebrow. I examine the many sources which contributed to Friederike, from Goethe to Wagner to contemporary plays; analyse the score's stylistic allusions and the performance of star tenor Richard Tauber; and finally turn to Lehár's rhetorical positioning of his work on the Berlin theatrical scene. I argue that operetta scholarship itself has traditionally been ill-equipped to deal with Lehár's late works and operetta more generally, and that middlebrow studies’ nuanced consideration of questions of art, commerce and prestige can contribute more widely to operetta and Weimar historiography.

Hussle and Motivate: An Afrocentric Understanding of Constitutive Rhetoric Toward Economic Empowerment in Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap Album

This essay examines the rhetorical strategies of the late Nipsey Hussle regarding the intersection of cultural rhetoric, identity, economic success, and financial literacy. Using what I call Afrocentric constitutive rhetoric as a methodological lens, I argue that Nipsey empowers his listeners toward an identity of economic success, specifically for marginalized communities, underscoring the ontological capacity of Hip-Hop rhetoric. To support this claim, I analyze select lyrics from Nipsey’s Grammy-nominated album, Victory Lap, released in 2018. Further, I illuminate the culturally distinct qualities of Nipsey’s rhetoric by coupling theorizations of Afrocentricity and constitutive rhetoric and its impact on identity formation for his listeners. Finally, I maintain that a cultural approach to constitutive rhetoric positions scholars to better understand the nuance of culturally specific rhetorical productions related to identity and economic empowerment.

Rome, Parthia, and the Politics of Peace: The Origins of War in the Ancient Middle East by Jason M. Schlude

Reviewed by: Rome, Parthia, and the Politics of Peace: The Origins of War in the Ancient Middle East by Jason M. Schlude Everett L. Wheeler Rome, Parthia, and the Politics of Peace: The Origins of War in the Ancient Middle East. By Jason M. Schlude. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. Pp. xvi+ 221. Hardback, $128.00. ISBN: 978-0-815-35370-6. From Antiquity on, nearly everyone has misinterpreted Roman-Parthian relations—even contemporaries like Tacitus and Cassius Dio, who experienced Parthian wars (9). Rather than hostility, we should consider peace and cooperation of the two major powers and frame supposed hostility within the effects of rhetorical posturing, largely for domestic consumption, which could then justify conflicts. This work departs from the victimology of the “no-Roman-strategy” school’s innocent, non-threatening Parthians beset by Roman aggression in conceding Parthian initiation of some conflicts, even if sometimes ripostes to Roman provocation. A “glory” motive for Roman campaigns, here “imperialist self-display,” is not entirely abandoned. Few specialists, however, will be deceived. The contrived arguments and myopic bibliographical gaze (largely anglophone) fail to capture the tension and delicacy of Roman-Parthian relations. Throughout, peace is assumed the norm, until disrupted by “troublemakers” like Crassus and Trajan. A certain naïveté about international relations permeates the volume, as if “peace” can be defined solely as the absence of armed conflict, thus ignoring the psychological dimensions of suspicion about a rival’s bona fides and potential threats, whether real or imagined. The author correctly recognizes that “peace” and mutual restraint coincided with practicality (13). Expediency might be the better term. After all, neither power realistically ever hoped to conquer the other except in rhetorical fantasies and Rome never attempted to advance beyond Mesopotamia into the Iranian plateau. Peace and cooperation are emphasized rather than limits on power, which for both states domestic issues and troublesome [End Page 479] frontiers elsewhere checked, even if both occasionally attempted to exploit the other’s woes. A larger context of Roman-Parthian relations is not addressed. Every generation from the 50s BCE to the 220s CE experienced a Parthian crisis or war. Yet Schlude’s “peaceful co-existence” of two rival powers misconstrues the situation. If head-on armed clashes were generally avoided, Armenia, the chief cause of Roman-Parthian conflicts directly or indirectly, became the circumscribed theater for proxy operations, where prestige could be won (or lost) at minimal risk.1 But the author’s superficial understanding of the Armenian problem is clear, particularly in treating the Neronian compromise (63 CE), termed “cooperative imperialism” (139 n.45). If Nero, like Augustus (20 BCE), disguised peace with images of conquest, Tiridates I’s crowning at Rome obscured a Parthian victory. Festus’ terse but accurate assessment (Brev. 20) is essentially ignored: “Nero lost Armenia.” Arsacid rule in Armenia reversed the policy from Augustus on of having an Armenian king with at least a drop of Artaxiad blood in his veins. Vologaeses I’s (temporary) withdrawal from the war with delivery of hostages in 55 reflected expediency, not restraint, as a pretender loomed besides a revolt in Hyrcania. Nor can Tacitus (Ann. 13.34.2, 37) be used to argue that the compromise of 63, already envisioned in the war’s early years, awaited only displays of Roman military might to obtain Parthian acceptance—revival of a view of the 1920s and 1930s (without acknowledgement). The war was originally thought to be over with the installation of Tigranes VI in 59.2 Nor will many favor an assertion (5) that East-West conflict begins with Carrhae (53 BCE), a notion generally associated with Herodotus’ view of the Persian Wars. Despite citation of some earlier bibliography (misguided in Schlude’s view), it remains unclear against whom the anti-hostility thesis is aimed, except for the claim in a popular book that Roman-Parthian conflict was “inevitable.”3 Should such weight be assigned to a popular book? No one has ever argued for a permanent state of war. [End Page 480] A decade’s gestation of the work from a 2009 Berkeley dissertation under Erich Gruen, whose stylistic influence can be discerned, did not...

Preface: Shakespeare and Milton

Preface: Shakespeare and Milton

A ‘Fiction of the Mind’: Imagination and Idolatry in Early Modern England

Abstract This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as ‘idolatry’, and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English Protestants, Catholics were responsible for transforming the good news of the Gospel into a mere fiction of their own making. More than a mere rhetorical posture — though of course it was also that — it is here argued that Protestant anti-Catholic polemic encodes a more generalized anxiety about the role of imagination within religious, social and political life, and thus serves as a microcosm of larger-scale transformations within the intellectual and political discourse of early modern England. Most obviously, the emphasis on the imagination, in particular within Protestant polemics, indicates a new context into which traditional scholastic psychological categories were forced in order to accommodate confessional differentiation and the new political realities of a post-Reformation world. Thus, by understanding just what Protestant polemicists meant by fictions, we can open up deeper continuities across the intellectual and political discourse of the period.

A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850, by Paul Keen

Reviewed by: A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850 by Paul Keen Kimberly J. Stern (bio) A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850, by Paul Keen; pp. xi + 171. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $99.99 paper, $79.00 ebook. We know the arguments all too well. Faced with budget cuts, diminishing enrollments, and a socio-political climate that demands real action, humanists are on the defense. Some claim that the humanities are valuable because they yield concrete learning outcomes and transferable skills. Others suggest that while the humanities may garner such results, their real value lies in providing access to specialized knowledge that is, as John Henry Newman observes, "an end in itself" (The Idea of a University [Yale UP, 1996], 85). As I have said, we know the arguments all too well. But this is precisely Paul Keen's point in his new book, A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850. By interrogating the history of this debate, Keen proposes that we can become more informed participants in it. Although Keen's book immerses the reader in debates that transpired roughly two hundred years ago, this "factual revision of our received cultural history," to borrow the words of Raymond Williams, makes it possible to approach our contemporary predicament with fresh eyes (Culture and Society [Columbia UP, 1983], viii). How can we do the vital work of interrogating the history and practice of humanistic study while also defending it? How can we advocate for the relevance of the humanities while admitting its failings? "To put this more constructively," Keen writes, "how might we begin to theorize a new 'new humanism' . . . that takes an honest engagement with these tensions as its starting point without abandoning the political impulse that helped to fuel critiques of humanism in recent decades?" (15). For Keen, the humanities are distinguished less by a stable archive of knowledge than by a willingness to probe the limits of what is known. In this spirit, this volume examines early nineteenth-century debates about the utility of the [End Page 461] humanities—in the public sphere and in education—in order to unsettle the claims that have defined this debate in our own time. As Keen illustrates in chapter 1, these claims do not always align with the political or rhetorical positions we might expect. It was Robert Southey, a "hardened Tory," who promoted in his Colloquies on Society (1829) a "model version of the public role of the humanities as a discursive space in which larger questions about human freedom and social justice could be negotiated" (37). Thomas Macaulay, an outspoken Whig, refused such a model on the grounds that the Poet Laureate had ventured into questions of economic policy that could not be treated in strictly aesthetic terms. More strikingly, Macaulay's critique of Southey is underwritten by some of the very claims that continue to inform contemporary defenses of the humanities; the poet's vision was, he proposed, incoherent and thus "provided those who were already inclined to dismiss the arts with all of the ammunition they needed" (30). Nineteenth-century thinkers did not always treat the arts and the humanities in binary terms—as a choice between applied and pure knowledge, conservatism and reform. Indeed, in chapter 2, Keen tracks the efforts of nineteenth-century thinkers to promote an "anti-sectarian" approach to the humanities, citing William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and John Stuart Mill as noteworthy advocates for "embracing literary and instrumentalist approaches as mutually enriching elements of any struggle to mobilize knowledge in the cause of reform" (80). Keen touches on many familiar thinkers and texts here. He notes, for instance, that famous passage in Mill's Autobiography (1873) where Mill locates his shifting views on utility in his reading of William Wordsworth. Yet Keen's account enables us to see Mill's mental crisis with new eyes, as less a repudiation of utility than an awakening to the political possibilities of poetry. It is a notion Mill pursues more explicitly in his 1832 essay "On Genius," which...

Dope and Deny: A Comparative Study of News Frames in American and Russian Coverage of American and Russian Athletes

This content analysis builds on past studies done on media coverage, rhetorical analyses, and journalistic role enactment by examining American and Russian news publications’ (N = 422) coverage of American and Russian doping scandals between 2013 and 2016. This time frame was selected because it was the height of Lance Armstrong and Major League Baseball doping coverage in the United States and the height of Olympic track-and-field doping coverage in Russia. It also fell between the time the World Anti-Doping Agency ratified its third code, which gave the antidoping organization the authority to conduct independent investigations. The study investigates media framing from the midpoint of the scandal, after the sports persona or sports entity denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Whether American and Russian coverage differ in the use of episodic and thematic frames, where blame is placed, and whether episodic or thematic framing predicts blame placement were all examined. Furthermore, the study investigates both nations’ coverage of “their own” athletes and of athletes from the other nation and analyzes whether or how the rhetorical posture of denial leads to adversarial journalism as a role enactment in coverage of sport-related scandals.

A New Scale for Global History

A New Scale for Global History

Deliberating Upon the Living Wage to Alleviate In-Work Poverty: A Rhetorical Inquiry Into Key Stakeholder Accounts.

Most developed nations have a statutory minimum wage set at levels insufficient to alleviate poverty. Increased calls for a living wage have generated considerable public controversy. This article draws on 25 interviews and four focus groups with employers, low-pay industry representatives, representatives of chambers of commerce, pay consultants, and unions. The core focus is on how participants use prominent narrative tropes for the living wage and against the living wage to argue their respective perspectives. We also document how both affirmative and negative tropes are often combined by participants to craft their own rhetorical positions on the issue.

Rhetorical Swordfighting and Satire in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia

Abstract Thomas Watson’s critics have suggested that The Hekatompathia, Or Passionate Centurie of Love ambitiously aspired to be a pedagogical text, but if this work is designed to teach, then this essay suggests Watson’s manipulations of genre, style, and intertexts combine to offer a pedagogy for poets, a compilation of rhetorical postures one may employ to simultaneously deliver and disguise socio-political satire in Elizabethan England. This essay first discusses how Hekatompathia additionally signals its satirical aims by participating in the pasquinade tradition, and positioning a “pasquine piller” at the volta of this sequence of one hundred passions. Next, it shows how Watson’s “passions” intertextually recall Pierre de Ronsard’s Discours des Misères de ce Temps, a collection of lyrics satirizing the French factionalism that has led to civil war, as well as Thomas Jeney’s later English translation that turns a mirror to princes toward Queen Elizabeth. Upon recognizing the Ronsardian subtexts of courtly factionalism and civil unrest associated with Watson’s “passions,” one may see how they are compounded as the poet sets them forth in the “pathetical style” of Seneca and Lucan. The civil wars of ancient Rome and subsequent imperial tyranny are frequently held up as a cautionary tales for early modern English and European rulers, but Watson’s simultaneous translation of the French Wars of Religion relocates these civil broils in England, implicating Elizabethan court dissidence and hypocrisy.

Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2021

Darmstadt was a bit different this year. The original 1946 courses had 120 registered participants in situ; I was told that the number this time around was larger (around 140), but only just. As an announcement for the final post-concert wrap stated, these were the COVID-19 courses. So: much smaller, much more concentrated, with almost every performance streamed online, and every other seat in the concert hall marked off with a weird sort of police tape with the Darmstadt logo on it. It's difficult to write about these things without lapsing into world-historical rhetorical posturing, as if the best lens to view the series of overlapping catastrophes we are living through is a biannual summer course for what, for better or worse, continues to be referred to as new music.

BEAM Me Up: Teaching Rhetorical Methods for Source Use and Synthesis

BEAM is a schema for categorizing the rhetorical positions of authors according to the author’s intention or purpose of the information. The author critiques common methods of teaching source evaluation and proposes that instruction librarians teach BEAM to students who may struggle using a source once they have located it. A lesson plan is included as supplemental materials.

An approach to creative media literacy for world issues.

This article introduces an approach to creative media literacy for world issues (WIs) such as Covid-19. In so doing, the article integrates four positions on discourse and media as terrible facets of globalization in the context of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The objectivist position deals with WIs as neutral discourse shared among humanity and distributed through English as an international language and educational media. The ideologist position treats creative media literacy as relations of power between global and local identities in the form of competing discourses associated with WIs. The rhetorical position reveals the hidden strategies used in global media discourse and English as a global language. The social constructionist position provides three levels of analysis for creative media literacy among university students: textual analysis, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis. The article concludes with guidelines on how lecturers can implement this approach with English as a foreign language (EFL) students.

Review: The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome, by Nicola Denzey Lewis

Review: The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome, by Nicola Denzey Lewis