Rhetorical Theory

Rhetorical Materialism: The Cognitive Division of Labor and the Social Dimensions of Argument."

by Ron Greene

Co-authored with Heather Ashley Hayes. Argumentation and Advocacy 48.3 (Winter 2012): 190-193, Part of special forum on Mercier and Sperber's Why Do Humans Reason?"

“Linked like a Chain: Revelation 22.6-9 in the light of an Ancient Transition Technique,” New Testament Studies 47 (2001): 105-117

by Bruce Longenecker

Rev 22.6–9 exhibits an elaborate structure. Fundamental to its structural complexity is the rhetorical technique of... more Rev 22.6–9 exhibits an elaborate structure. Fundamental to its structural complexity is the rhetorical technique of ‘chain-link’ construction, discussed by both Lucian of Samosata and Quintilian. Appearing in at least three other passages in the Johannine apocalypse, this transition device involves a back-and-forth (AbaB) arrangement of ideas that has not been adequately appreciated in modern scholarship. Rev 22.6–9 has occasionally been characterised as the product of a second-rate or ‘irregular’ mind. In fact, however, these verses evidence a structural feature commended by ancient rhetoricians concerned with presentational clarity and force.

New Media Texts of WWII: Kenneth Burke’s Intersection with Computer Culture

by Jason C. Thompson

Disabled upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island

by Jay Dolmage

I will examine Ellis Island in the early 20th century as a “special rhetorical space,” a heterotopia for the invention... more I will examine Ellis Island in the early 20th century as a “special rhetorical space,” a heterotopia for the invention of new categories of deviation. And I will suggest that Ellis Island floats into every aspect of contemporary American society.  As Robert Chang has argued, “the border is not just a peripheral phenomenon…to be an immigrant is to be marked [always] by the border” (27).  Further, “it is through its flexible operation that the border helps to construct and contain the nation and the national community” (Chang 27).  Ellis Island has been rhetorically used, internalized, incorporated, embodied.

“Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence.”

by Jody Enders

“Medieval Studies Issue” of Theatre Survey 38 (1997): 139-60.

Review of Bernard Alan Miller: Rhetoric's Earthly Realm

by Ira Allen

Composition Studies 40(1): 151-154.

The spaces of public dissension: Reconsidering the public sphere

by Kendall Phillips

Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault

by Kendall Phillips

Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance

by Kendall Phillips

The RHIZOME Project

by Martin E. Rosenberg

_The RHIZOME Project_ (1988-91; @1991), co-authored with Tom I. Ellis, and created in Hypercard. _RHIZOME_ was a critical thinking hypertext which offered creative as well as rhetorical and logical heuristics for the writing of a range of undergraduate essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, and several articles were generated to explain its theoretical as well as pedagogical implications. Two other programmers, Stuart Selber, and Johndan Johnson-Eiola, worked briefly on the interface in 1991.

The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to... more The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to model specific sequential (as in narrative and logic) and non-sequential (as in creative and associative) thought strategies to help students write academic and creative essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, including U Michigan, UC Berkeley, ASU, University of Illinois and Carnegie Mellon U. Comprised of separate "stacks" each modeling a specific heuristic, these stacks included:
1. Jazzwriting--a non-linear and recursive environment for generating and then exfoliating ideas in response to an automated or self-initiated prompt. Designed with the composing practices of BeBop jazz musicians in mind (improvisation/composition/improvisation), it offered recursive access to strategies for the improvisation of thoughts, and guided students to explore their more formal elaboration according to the rules of rhetoric, which was then linked to another "stack called:
2. Brainstorming--a non-linear, yet also sequential cluster of rhetorical heuristics: "Narrative," "Description," "Definition," "Comparison/Contrast," "Argument,"--each of which consitituted a "stack" which contained a sequence of prompts (often based on challenging heuristics such as Kenneth Burke's Pentad, for Narrative) to help expand the range of implications of ideas generated spontaneously in Jazzwriting. It was also possible to "jump" randomly or deliberately from one to the other of these heuristics, so that five separate threads of thought might be developed from the initial Jazzwriting responses. All five of these stacks then were projected into the next stack:
3. Arguprompt--which guided students through a series of prompts that would generate positions, assumptions, arguments and evidence, objections and replies to those objections, in such a way that each prompt generated a paragraph in sequence. At any point in the process of "inventing" and "arranging" an argument, the user could highlight and then export a particular assertion into another "stack" called:
4. Enthymemes--which would, through the use of dialog boxes, center that assertion into the form of an Enthymeme, which would then prompt the student to respond to a few questions. Answering these additional questions would then trigger the hypertext program to translate the Enthymeme into a formal syllogism; and then offer the opportunity to translate that socratic syllogism into a Toulmin unit of logic, with assumptions and grounds for those assumptions. Furthermore, from Arguprompt, the students could access another stack called:
5. Style--which would offer students exercises to work on semantics, grammar and syntax.
As the student progressed through the sequence of four distinct environments, or worked exclusively with just one of them, the student could export generated text to a word processing program for further engagement with the processes of invention, arrangement and style.

Informed by the specific practices of jazz musicians and composers, the behavior of bifurcating systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics described by Ilya Prigogine, as well as the non-linear models from philosophy exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their concept of the rhizome, the project was an application of the theories explored in my theoretical dissertation: _Being and Becoming: Physics, Hegemony, Art and the Nomad in the Works of Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Thomas Pynchon_ (1989). This project was followed by an online real-time text-based virtual reality classroom of multiple rooms with functional tools at the Media Lab MOO called _MER's Fungal Palace_ (1996), with which I taught several graduate seminars linked to seminars at other universities (1996-8); and _Chess RHIZOME_, an exploratory hypermedia database to explore the contradictory epistemological implications of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary formations (1998).

Lillian von der Walde Moheno, “Artes praedicandi: La estructura del sermón”, destiempos.com 3:18 (2009), 1-12.

by Lillian von der Walde Moheno

Rhetoric, Coercion, and the Memory of Violence

by Jody Enders

In Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages. Ed. Rita Copeland, 24-55. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Pour Protagoras: Angenot et le sens du social. Dialogues de sourds. Traité de rhétorique antilogique de Marc Angenot. Mille et une nuits, 450 p. Dialogues de sourds. …

by Yan Hamel

“The Wolf and the Sorcerer: From Psycho to Schizo

by Robert Leston

Under Review. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. http://kairos.technorhetoric.net Digital Video and Webtext.

Recent work in philosophy and rhetorical/cultural studies has begun to turn towards the notion that humans and objects... more Recent work in philosophy and rhetorical/cultural studies has begun to turn towards the notion that humans and objects share an equivalent ontological status, a turn consistent with the question of the animal. This project begins by asking, given the speeds of its technological advancements, to what extent does humanity seek to eradicate its own inhuman nature? Since the pre-Socratics, the human has been defined as “zoon logon echon,” the animal whose being is essentially delineated by his ability to speak. This concern with the uses of language has resulted in what Deleuze and Guattari call “humankind’s fundamental neurosis,” the will to interpret, or what they call the “interpretosis of the priest.” Interpretation follows the formula, “You said X, but what you really mean is Y,” and is carried out in order to make a unity, to deny the truth of the thing and to transfigure it so that it conforms to an idea. Thus, the Jew, Negro, savage, woman, dog, child, cow, chicken, statement, and dream are never complete in and of themselves. I will argue that such an act of interpretation is an act of cruelty grounded on identification with humanity, an identification that is ordered upon the rigorous denial of the human’s animal desires and passions that immanently unfold from the will to power and thus give birth to the human. Historically, to be human means to deny our animal natures. For Deleuze and Guattari, overcoming this denial is a matter of “becoming-animal,” a mode of becoming that leads to the celebrated disappearance of the human and a becoming-imperceptible. In an age of carbon footprints and cultural narcissism, Deleuze and Guattari have much to offer scholars and pedagogues interested in using writing as a way of reconnecting scholarship and students to the worlds of animals and things.

Leston, Robert. “Unhinged: Kairos and the Invention of the Untimely” Atlantic Journal of Communication. 21.1 (2013):

by Robert Leston

Forthcoming

The argument comes in two parts and, at a general level, is straightforward. The first part depends on first... more The argument comes in two parts and, at a general level, is straightforward. The first part depends on first identifying and tracing this pattern of thought taking place in the scholarship. Following this trajectory reveals that while the scholarship has added considerably to a refined understanding of the environment surrounding kairos, it has not furthered the inventive potential of kairos because it has been overly invested in how kairos arises from historical and cultural forces. Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and in the traditional manner, invention emerges from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. Consequently, invention can thus be said to be largely determined by the environment and history to which it belongs. The grouping I follow below has added to the understanding of the complexity of that environment, but it has done so at the cost of thinking of how to add to the understanding of invention. The second part hopes to invigorate studies in kairic invention by drawing the reader’s attention to those aspects that lie outside these historical and cultural forces. What if invention was considered from a bolder perspective? What if it was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a system or situation? What if invention was thought of as innovative potential to change the course of history rather than being determined by it? Why has rhetoric accepted the determination that rhetorical invention deals merely with finding the known while, at least since Francis Bacon, new knowledge has become the province of the sciences? The second line of argument, then, is to rethink kairos at the level of its silent and hidden potential. I go on to show that taking advantage of the radically innovative potential of kairos. requires attention to its untimely dimension.

Troubled Freedom: The Grounds of Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis

by Ira Allen

in Antonio de Velasco and Melody Lehn (eds.), Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2011, p. 123-131.

Crystalline listening, refusing to be God, intimate epistemology and the new sermon: A rhetoric of sexual tolerance

by Cynthia Mahaffey

A rhetoric of inclusion and tolerance for "sexual minorities" (LGBT) persons A rhetoric of inclusion and tolerance for "sexual minorities" (LGBT) persons

Legitimând Europa, legitimaţi de Europa: construcţia legitimării ca dublu joc în discursul candidaţilor la alegerile europarlamentare

by Alexandru Cârlan

Title, in English: Legitimating Europe, legitimated by Europe: constructing legitimacy as a double game in the speeches of Romanian candidates for the European Parliament
(to be published .....)

The aim of the study is to analyze, starting from Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization on the double logic of the political... more The aim of the study is to analyze, starting from Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization on the double logic of the political game, how the Romanian candidates for the European Parliament in the 2009 elections constructed legitimacy through their speeches. The study shows how the double game of politics, as accounted by Bourdieu, translates into a double direction in the transfer of legitimacy: politicians not only speak in the name of the group that they represent, but they also bring the group into existence by speaking in its behalf; similarly, they will not only legitimize Europe and its institutions through their speech, but they will also capitalize legitimacy for themselves speaking for Europe, in the name of a fictitious group whose adherence to the European values is from the very beginning assumed. To reach this conclusion, the study proceeds by first highlighting some methodological considerations relevant for analysis, illustrating them through a case study (section 1), then Bourdieu’s perspective on the logic of the political field is presented (section 2), continuing with the presentation of various rhetorical theories able to clarify the concept of “construction of audience” as a rhetorical counterpart of Bourdieu’s insights on the relation between groups and spokespersons (section 3), and with a discussion of the concept of legitimation, mainly within a critical discourse analysis approach (section 4), elaborating thus a theoretical framework for the analysis of the discursive construction and discursive transfers of legitimacy, on a corpus of speeches of some prominent Romanian candidates in the elections for the European Parliament, in June 2009. The conclusion is that Europe is not only a project to be legitimized through political action, but also a topic able to provide legitimacy to politicians who construct their audience as if an uncritical, submissive consensus to what Europe, European institutions and European values represent would have been granted the status of shared starting point.

Speech Communication In the Twentieth Century

by Thomas Benson

Rethinking Immaterial Labor: Communication, Reality, and Neo-Radicalism

by Jason Del Gandio

Published in Radical Philosophy Review Volume 14 number 2 (2011) 121–138

Working from the post-Workerist tradition, this
essay re-specifies the phenomenon of immaterial labor.more Working from the post-Workerist tradition, this
essay re-specifies the phenomenon of immaterial labor.
Immaterial labor is not simply a mode of work relevant to the
information-based global economy. Instead, immaterial labor
is inherent to the human condition: human beings materialize
realities through the immaterial means of communication.
This ontological approach to immaterial labor enables us to
rethink the radical project: rather than trying to “change the
world,” we are now called to create alternative realities that
resist the subjugation of our immaterial laboring. Since we are
all immaterial laborers, we all have a stake in revolutionizing
our realities. This essay provides a preliminary sketch of this
political philosophy.