Rhetorical Scholarship Research Articles

How Computational Tools Can Help Rhetoric and Informal Logic with Argument Invention

This paper compares the features and methods of the two leading implemented systems that offer a tool for helping a user to find or invent arguments to support or attack a designated conclusion, the Carneades Argumentation System and the IBM Watson Debater tool. The central aim is to contribute to the understanding of scholars in informal logic, rhetoric and argumentation on how these two software systems can be useful for them. One contribution of the paper is to explain to these potential users how the two tools are applicable to the task of inventing arguments by using some simple illustrative examples. Another is to redefine the structure of argument invention as a procedure.

Editor’s Note

The bouleutêrion (the council house or assembly hall) was the meeting place of the council of citizens in ancient Greece under democracy. The architecture of bouleutêria has been less studied than has the architecture of theaters and religious monuments. The standard study remains William McDonald’s The Political Meeting Places of the Greeks (Johns Hopkins University Press), published in 1943. The study by Christopher Lyle Johnstone and Richard J. Graff that follows here builds on McDonald’s work but analyzes bouleutêria from a distinctly rhetorical perspective: in “Situating Deliberative Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: The Bouleutêrion as a Venue for Oratorical Performance,” they study bouleutêria from the perspective of places of oratorical performance. Theirs is the first study of oratorical sites in ancient Greece that includes both computer-generated reconstructions of the sites, enabling scholars to evaluate sightlines, and technical acoustical analysis, permitting judgments of what was likely heard from particular locations in a particular bouleutêrion. The increased interest in the material conditions of oratorical performances among rhetoric scholars and the uniqueness of Johnstone and Graff’s approach led to the decision to devote virtually this entire issue to their study. The responses to Johnstone and Graff by two scholars, Peter O’Connell, Classics, University of Georgia and author of The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (University of Texas Press, 2017), and James Fredel, English, Ohio State University and author of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Performance from Solon to Demosthenes (Southern Illinois, 2006) complement Johnstone and Graff’s study.

Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters

Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters

مصطلح الطباق بين مركزية المعنى والتعدد الدلالي

This research aims at studying the term (Antonym) through aspects of difference and agreement of rhetoric scholars regarding the linguistic and idiomatic meaning which is rich in matching, difference and opposite meanings. We shall read it again to shed the light on its effect on reading texts and dialogues within the multi conceptualization of the same term. The difficulty of this study shall be indicated by the multi meanings of the term (Antonym) at the time of old linguists resulting from branching, dividing and the formal view. They had terms like (antonym, application, equality, opposite and matching). They are all forms one term. Modern scholars made new branches related to the functional aspect which pass over the formal appearance. So, it has now positive and negative aspect, symbolic and apparent opposite, etc. The term (Antonym) has an equivalent in the western culture which is known as dual opposites. Researchers dealt with it in accordance with the new rhetoric system. This entailed variety, difference in term to make the meaning clear and accurate, indicating the terms derived from one source, showing their minute differences in order to collect all meanings one term and unifying all branches in one source in away indicating other rhetoric terms to make it fundamental under the unity of meaning.

A Better Feeling for Making the World Better? TOMS’s Tropes and the Buy-One-Give-One Mode

This essay asks how social enterprises like TOMS generate so much consumer affective investment in an age whose cause-related messaging fatigues shoppers. I find one answer in the energizing buy-one-give-one mode in which TOMS participates and to which it gives collective access. The mode expresses an increasingly widespread sensibility that company growth cannot proceed indefinitely without constraint by company largesse: gathering and growth must be countered by expenditure and even a kind of waste. Modal analysis of metonymic tropes within TOMS’s discourse (by chief executive officer Blake Mycoskie) shows how the company gives a feel for connecting the apparently opposed concerns of self-interested acquisition and “wasteful” expenditure—doing good and doing well—without collapsing one into the other. Unfortunately, other social enterprise rhetorics have failed not only to acquire but also to “waste” consumer enthusiasm in similarly generative fashion, thereby deactivating at times the significance of social enterprise’s projects. This essay concludes by discussing why modal reading of affective investments matters for rhetorical scholarship in this historical moment.

The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine as a “Teaching Subject”: Lessons from the Medical Humanities and Simulation Pedagogy

ABSTRACTThe rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners.

1968: Music as Rhetoric in Social Movements

<p>In 1968 social movements sparked rhetorical discourses which occurred in many nations and on hundreds of colleges and in communities across the United States. These rhetorical discourses ultimately changed the direction of human events. Sometimes these points of ideological protests shared views on specific issues, especially demonstrations against the Vietnam War, but each conflict was also its own local conflict. There is no evidence that any specific group organized the protests, or that speakers motivated demonstrations, or that the rhetoric of one protest caused other protests. Yet, the protests were not just spontaneous fires that happened to occur in the same year. So, how is it that so many protesters shared the desire for change and shared rhetoric, but each protest was sparked by local issues? Answering that question provides insight into how the rhetoric of social movements occurred in 1968. </p><p> Many scholars call for the study of the social movements of the 1960s. Jensen (1996) argues, “The events of the 1960s dramatically increased the interest in studying social movements and forced rhetorical scholars to reconsider their methods for studying public discourse” (p. 28). To Lucas (2006), “Words became weapons in the cultural conflict that divided America” (x). Schippa (2001) wrote, “Many accounts identify the 1960s as a turning point. For better or for worse, there was a confluence of changing rhetorical practices, expanding rhetorical theories, and opportunities for rhetorical criticism. The cultural clashes of the 1960s were felt perhaps most acutely on college campuses. The sufficiency of deliberative argument and public address can be said to have been called into question, whether one was an antiwar activist who hated LBJ's war in Vietnam or a pro-establishment stalwart trying to make sense of the rhetoric of protest and demonstration. Years later, scholars would characterize war itself as rhetorical. What counted as rhetorical practice was up for grabs”(p. 261).</p> First, this paper will frame the protest movement of 1968. Then, we will search for the common factors that shaped the protests of 1968, focusing on the role of music. This analysis will provide insight into how music became a rhetorical force in a significant social movement of the 20th Century.

The Greeks, Pragmatism, and the Endless Mediation of Rhetoric and Philosophy

ABSTRACT This article begins by revisiting the Greek origins of the terms “rhetoric” and “philosophy” from a nominalist and antiessentialist perspective. Though both terms were given early shape by Plato, Isocrates offered a different take on philosophia that arguably is equally legitimate, even if largely neglected historically. In contemporary scholarship, the question is not what is rhetoric or what is philosophy, but what can be gained by deploying rhetorical and philosophical vocabularies to describe and understand the world. Given the problems facing us today, philosophers and rhetoric scholars should engage each other to address challenges where our interests converge.

“Our tears are not enough”: The warrant of the dead in the rhetoric of gun control

ABSTRACTThe warrant of the dead refers to an explicit or implicit claim that the dead place a demand on the living. The living are called on to act and the dead are invoked as justification for that action: since they died, we should do X. Seeing this rhetorical move as a warrant is useful because the connection between the dead and the requested action of the living is often assumed rather than argued outright. This essay examines how, why, and to what effect President Barack Obama used the warrant of the dead in his gun control rhetoric since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. By extending, expanding, and intensifying memories of the victims of gun violence, Obama used the warrant of the dead to try to establish sustained concern for those victims and thus sustained commitment to gun control. Yet Obama’s effort to transform gun control supporters into gun control activists proved largely ineffective. Examining this partial rhetorical failure offers rhetorical scholars important insights about the warrant of the dead, the gun debate, and, more generally, the challenges of public argument and deliberation in an era of fleeting engagement.

Susan B. Anthony’s Extemporaneous Speaking for Woman Suffrage

ABSTRACTSusan B. Anthony’s public career serves as both a case study within and a reflection of extemporaneous speaking culture in the nineteenth century. This essay argues that Anthony’s rhetorical influence in the fight for woman suffrage is best explained through her mastery of extemporaneous speaking within a culture that taught and valued the practice. This essay analyzes Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking in the 1870s and 1880s. Beyond gaining a better understanding of the role extemporaneous speaking played in Anthony’s suffrage advocacy, this essay illustrates how rhetorical scholars might analyze the fragmentary texts that record and report on extemporaneous speaking and reflects on the implication of studying those fragmentary texts for expanding the canon of scholarship on women.

Metaphorical Language as a Battleground for Tradition and Newness in Late Mughal Persian

AbstractSirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Khān, known as Ārzū (d. 1756), made a number of sweeping pronouncements during his impressive career as a poet and philologist in Delhi. He claimed to be the first person in the Persian philological tradition to have noticed the historical ties between Persian and Indian languages. That claim is well known to scholars, but a more obscure but arguably even more important statement appears in the preface of his ʿAṭiyya-i Kubrā (The great gift). He writes that it is the first work to explain “the science of clear statement” (ʿilm-i bayān) in Persian. This article situates this facet of rhetoric in its historical context. By considering several exemplars of contemporary critical discourse, we can reevaluate a dominant paradigm in Persianate literary history, namely, decadence. Modern critics have typically indexed the degree of the apparent degradation in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Persian literature to its metaphorical complexity. In fact, far from fretting over a decadent and degraded literature, critics like Ārzū were grappling with the possibility of theorizing the integration of new ideas and new metaphors into the rhetorical tradition. Furthermore, the consolidation of rhetorical scholarship in Persian in this period coincided with the expansion of literary production in the north Indian Islamicate context in other languages. Many of the people responsible for translating and reformulating Arabic philological texts in Persian had a stake in both Persian and what would later be called Urdu literature. The implications of this trilingual consciousness have not been satisfactorily explained.

Crafting cosmopolitan nationalism: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s rhetorical leadership

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes the rhetoric of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of post-conflict Liberia, for how it transformed national citizenship into cosmopolitan citizenship. Specifically, she promoted cosmopolitan values to global and regional audiences; codified cosmopolitan values into national policies and initiatives; and enabled Liberian women as citizens whose cosmopolitan practices fortified national, regional, and global communities. Through these concrete cosmopolitan practices, Liberian women performed as ideal citizens of the new democracy. Thus, this essay demonstrates how rhetorical scholars can turn to cosmopolitan theory to explain how rhetorical leaders can transform how and what it means to belong, especially for women.

Quality, Rhetoric, and Choric Regression: Revisiting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

In this article, I reexamine quality and rhetoric in Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance through Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora. To that end, I review three analyses of Pirsig's novel, reinscribe quality as a prediscursive experience of undifferentiated wholeness, argue that regression back into Kristeva's chora is one way to recover this prediscursive experience, and hypothesize that the rhetoric of Zen is an unstable discourse in which prediscursive energies from the chora disrupt and realign the meanings of signifiers. I conclude by generalizing my work beyond Pirsig's novel to three concepts in rhetorical scholarship.

O Elogio de Helena de Isócrates: réplica a Górgias e a unicidade de seu discurso epidítico

<p>Por volta de 390-80 a.C., o ateniense Isócrates compõe um de seus primeiros discursos como educador, o <em>Elogio de Helena</em>. De acordo com boa parte da crítica, esse discurso parece ser uma réplica ao famoso <em>Elogio de Helena</em> de Górgias, que, segundo Isócrates (§14), teria composto não um encômio, mas uma apologia em nome da rainha espartana. No encômio isocrático, percebemos certa dissonância entre o proêmio e o restante da obra. Com efeito, ainda não temos no proêmio o tom encomiástico esperado, mas ele se configura, ao contrário, como uma invectiva a grupos de sofistas contemporâneos de Isócrates, e culmina, ao final, com uma crítica alusiva ao sofista de Leontine. Destarte, o que os sofistas do séc. IV a.C. teriam em comum com a mítica Helena? Em outras palavras, haveria algum fio condutor que assegurasse uma unicidade discursiva nesse exercício epidítico de Isócrates? O presente trabalho tem por finalidade discutir essas questões e rever como elas vêm sendo debatidas por alguns comentadores de Isócrates, partindo de Aristóteles na <em>Retórica</em> até a recepção do problema entre alguns dos estudiosos de Retórica Clássica do séc. XX.</p>

Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece

Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece

Moving Rhetorica

Native to ancient dialogues, medieval allegories, and early modern iconologies, Rhetorica has come to represent rhetoric as an area of academic inquiry. In this essay, we consider how contemporary rhetorical scholars and organizations have used Rhetorica and explore the potential of other personifications of rhetoric and persuasion, drawing on rhetoric’s histories to supply new inventive resources for rhetorical inquiry. First, we introduce lesser-known depictions of Rhetorica. Her range gives historical grounding to a scholarly imaginary that has moved beyond yet still uses Mantegna’s Rhetorica. We do not urge rhetoricians to select a new face for the discipline but instead to recognize Rhetorica’s own diversity and history as an on-going aid and asset to rhetorical thinking and theorizing. Second, we advocate a shift from an exclusive focus on Rhetorica to a shared focus on her less disciplinarily profuse predecessor, Peithō (persuasion).

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication

Hurricane Katrina and the chōric object of rhetorical studies

ABSTRACTThis essay reads former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s infamous radio interview given during the aftermath of Hurricane to rethink both the popular narrative about the federal response to Katrina and, more broadly, the displacement of rhetorical objects both popularly and within rhetorical scholarship. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s early work, I advocate for a turn to a particular understanding of chōra, which positions critics in provisional relation objects of rhetorical study. Finally, I tender a reading of Nagin’s post-Katrina radio interview. The essay ultimately argues that: (1) the chōric function of Nagin’s interview simultaneously spurred political change and displaced the appearance of having done so; and (2) if rhetorical studies is to avoid remaining complicit with the politics of such displacement, scholars should attend carefully not only to what counts as rhetorical, but also to those objects that do not count but nevertheless function rhetorically. Reconsidering the object domain of rhetorical studies in this way not only opens up new objects for study but also accounts for how they might function outside of already established narratives.

Mobility, citizenship, and “American women on the move” in the 1977 International Women’s Year torch relay

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the 1977 International Women’s Year torch relay from Seneca Falls to Houston to demonstrate the rhetoricity of mobility and theorize running as a mode of public address. The relay used the velocity of running to centralize athleticism and the female athlete as a crucial site for liberal feminist citizenship claims in 1977 in the context of Title IX and the struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment. The runners’ movement through space and place advanced a discursive performance of citizenship as they traversed the South. This analysis reveals mobility as a theoretical framework for rhetorical scholars interested in space, place, citizenship, and social movement.

The Rhetorical Alternative in Neurocinematics

The Rhetorical Alternative in Neurocinematics