Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe created a volume that set the agenda in the field of computers and composition scholarship for a decade. The technology changes that scholars of composition studies faced as the new century opened couldn't have been more deserving of passionate study. While we have always used technologies (e.g., the pencil) to communicate with each other, the electronic technologies we now use have changed the world in ways that we have yet to identify or appreciate fully. Likewise, the study of language and literate exchange, even our understanding of terms like literacy, text, and visual, has changed beyond recognition, challenging even our capacity to articulate them.
As Hawisher, Selfe, and their contributors engage these challenges and explore their importance, they "find themselves engaged in the messy, contradictory, and fascinating work of understanding how to live in a new world and a new century." The result is a broad, deep, and rewarding anthology of work still among the standard works of computers and composition study.
In a book that itself exemplifies the dialogic scholarship it proposes, Kay Halasek reconceives composition studies from a Bakhtinian perspective, focusing on both the discipline's theoretical assumptions and its pedagogies.
Framing her discussions at every level of the discipline—theoretical, historical, pedagogical—Halasek provides an overview of portions of the Bakhtinian canon relevant to composition studies, explores the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's work in the teaching of writing and for current debates about the role of theory in composition studies, and provides a model of scholarship that strives to maintain dialogic balance between practice and theory, between composition studies and Bakhtinian thought.
Halasek's study ranges broadly across the field of composition, painting in wide strokes a new picture of the discipline, focusing on the finer details of the rhetorical situation, and teasing out the implications of Bakhtinian thought for classroom practice by examining the nature of critical reading and writing, the efficacy and ethics of academic discourse, student resistance, and critical and conflict pedagogy. The book ends by setting out a pedagogy of possibility, what Halasek terms elsewhere a "post-critical pedagogy" that redefines and redirects current discussions of home versus academic literacies and discourses.
In Performing Antiracist Pedagogy, Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young seek to help create openings to address race and racism not only in course readings and class discussion in writing, rhetoric, and communication courses but also in wider public settings. The contributors to this collection, drawn from a wide range of disciplines, urge readers to renew their commitment to intelligently and publicly deliberate race and to counteract the effects of racism. The book is both theoretically rigorous and practical, providing readers with insightful analyses of race and racism and useful classroom suggestions and examples.
Contributors: Chiara Bacigalupa, Sophia Bell, Susan Leigh Brooks, Frankie Condon, Rasha Diab, John Dean, Thomas Ferrell, Beth Godbee, Dae-Joong Kim, Timothy Lensmire, Calvin M. Logue, Aja Y. Martinez, Rebecca Nathan, Bobbi Olson, Jessica Parker, Charise Pimentel, Octavio Pimentel, Mya Poe, Neil Simpkins, Nathan Snaza, Deatra Sullivan, Vershawn Ashanti Young
Responding to contemporary discussion about using personal accounts in academic writing, Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse draws on classical and current rhetorical theory, feminist theory, and relevant examples from both published writers and first-year writing students to illustrate the advantages of blending experiential and academic perspectives.
Candace Spigelman examines how merging personal and scholarly worldviews produces useful contradictions and contributes to a more a complex understanding in academic writing. This rhetorical move allows for greater insights than the reading or writing of experiential or academic modes separately does. Personally Speaking foregrounds the semi-fictitious nature of personal stories and the rhetorical possibilities of evidence as Spigelman provides strategies for writing instructors who want to teach personal academic argument while supplying practical mechanisms for evaluating experiential claims.
The volume seeks to complicate and intensify disciplinary debates about how compositionists should write for publication and what kinds of writing should be taught to composition students. Spigelman not only supplies evidence as to why the personal can count as evidence but also relates how to use it effectively by including student samples that reflect particular features of personal writing. Finally, she lays the groundwork to move narrative from its current site as confessional writing to the domain of academic discourse.
Invectives against Antony.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman advocate, orator, politician, poet, and philosopher, about whom we know more than we do of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In Cicero’s political speeches and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension, and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, 58 survive (a few incompletely), 29 of which are addressed to the Roman people or Senate, the rest to jurors. In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters, of which more than 800 were written by Cicero, and nearly 100 by others to him. This correspondence affords a revelation of the man, all the more striking because most of the letters were not intended for publication. Six works on rhetorical subjects survive intact and another in fragments. Seven major philosophical works are extant in part or in whole, and there are a number of shorter compositions either preserved or known by title or fragments.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
Invectives against Antony.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman advocate, orator, politician, poet, and philosopher, about whom we know more than we do of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In Cicero’s political speeches and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension, and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, 58 survive (a few incompletely), 29 of which are addressed to the Roman people or Senate, the rest to jurors. In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters, of which more than 800 were written by Cicero, and nearly 100 by others to him. This correspondence affords a revelation of the man, all the more striking because most of the letters were not intended for publication. Six works on rhetorical subjects survive intact and another in fragments. Seven major philosophical works are extant in part or in whole, and there are a number of shorter compositions either preserved or known by title or fragments.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
A Platonic evangelist’s lectures on the good life.
Maximus of Tyre, active probably in the latter half of the second century AD, was a devoted Platonist whose only surviving work consists of forty-one brief addresses on various topics of ethical, philosophical, and theological import including the nature of divinity, the immortality of the soul, the sources of good and evil, the injustice of vengeance, the tyranny of pleasures and desires, the contribution of the liberal arts, and the pursuit of happiness, among many others. These addresses are conveniently labeled orations, but their fluid and hybrid style resists precise generic categorization, so that they could also be called discourses, speeches, lectures, talks, inquiries, essays, or even sermons.
In his orations Maximus strove to elucidate the philosophical life of virtue, especially as exemplified in the career of Socrates and in the writings of Plato, inviting his audience, sometimes addressed as young men, to share in his knowledge, to appreciate his fresh presentation of philosophical topics, and perhaps even to join him in pursuing philosophy. Drawing on the Hellenic cultural tradition from Homer to the death of Alexander the Great, Maximus offers a rich collection of the famous philosophical, literary, and historical figures, events, ideas, successes, and failures that constituted Greek paideia in the so-called Second Sophistic era.
This edition of Maximus’ Philosophical Orations offers a fresh translation, ample annotation, and a text fully informed by current scholarship.
A Platonic evangelist’s lectures on the good life.
Maximus of Tyre, active probably in the latter half of the second century AD, was a devoted Platonist whose only surviving work consists of forty-one brief addresses on various topics of ethical, philosophical, and theological import including the nature of divinity, the immortality of the soul, the sources of good and evil, the injustice of vengeance, the tyranny of pleasures and desires, the contribution of the liberal arts, and the pursuit of happiness, among many others. These addresses are conveniently labeled orations, but their fluid and hybrid style resists precise generic categorization, so that they could also be called discourses, speeches, lectures, talks, inquiries, essays, or even sermons.
In his orations Maximus strove to elucidate the philosophical life of virtue, especially as exemplified in the career of Socrates and in the writings of Plato, inviting his audience, sometimes addressed as young men, to share in his knowledge, to appreciate his fresh presentation of philosophical topics, and perhaps even to join him in pursuing philosophy. Drawing on the Hellenic cultural tradition from Homer to the death of Alexander the Great, Maximus offers a rich collection of the famous philosophical, literary, and historical figures, events, ideas, successes, and failures that constituted Greek paideia in the so-called Second Sophistic era.
This edition of Maximus’ Philosophical Orations offers a fresh translation, ample annotation, and a text fully informed by current scholarship.
Bitzer shows that, by attempting to elaborate a general theory of rhetoric through empirical procedures, Campbell’s project reveals the limitations of his method. He cannot ground all statements empirically and it is at this point that his theological position comes into play. Inspection of his religious views shows that God’s design of human nature, and God’s revelations to humankind, make moral and spiritual truths known and quite secure to human beings, although not empirically.
Pagan rhetor, (Neo-)Platonist philosopher, Christian theologian
This collection of essays is devoted to the rhetoric, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology of Marius Victorinus, a mid-fourth-century professor of rhetoric and philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life. Scholars from eight different countries, some of whom have not previously published in English, reflect on debates about his writings and theological development. These topics include Victorinus's deployment of philosophical sources for trinitarian theology, possible connections in his work to Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Gnosticism, as well as his contributions to Latin rhetoric and dialectic. Contributors include Jan Dominik Bogataj, Michael Chase, Nello Cipriani, Stephen A. Cooper, Volker Henning Drecoll, Lenka Karfíková, Josef Lössl, Václav Němec, Thomas Riesenweber, Guadalupe Lopetegui Semperena, Miran Špelič, Chiara O. Tommasi, John D. Turner, and Florian Zacher. The chapters in this volume are of great interest to students of late antique philosophy, Christian theology, and Latin rhetoric.
In A Place for Dialogue, Sharon McKenzie Stevens views the contradictions and collaborations involved in the management of public land in southern Arizona—and by extension the entire arid West—through the lens of political rhetoric. Revealing the socioecological relationships among cattlemen and environmentalists as well as developers and recreationists, she analyzes the ways that language shapes landscape by shaping decisions about land use.
Stevens focuses on the collaborative Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan initiated by Pima County, Arizona, the ubiquitous use of scientific argument to defend contradictory practices, and the construction and negotiation of rancher/environmentalist identities to illuminate both literally and metaphorically the dynamics of land use politics. Drawing specifically upon extensive interviews with a diverse array of agents on all sides of the debate—ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, land managers, government officials—on historical narratives, and on her own conflicting experiences as someone who grew up with those who work the western lands, she demonstrates that it is possible to use differences to solve, rather than to aggravate, the entrenched problems that bridge land and language.
By integrating her richly textured case study of a fragile region with rhetorical approaches to narrative, science-based argument, and collective identities, Stevens makes a significant contribution to the fields of rhetoric, land management, and cultural studies.
Winner, Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize
Achieving the remarkable feat of linking composition theory, deconstruction, and classical rhetoric, this book has been admirably summarized by the theorist G. Douglas Atkins, who writes: "This lively and engaging, informed and informative book constitutes an important contribution. Though its ‘field’ is most obviously composition, composition theory, and pedagogy, part of its importance derives from the way it transcends disciplinary boundaries to bear on writing in general. . . I know of no book that so fully and well discusses, and evaluates, the implications of deconstruction for composition and pedagogy. That [it] goes ‘beyond deconstruction,’ rather than merely ‘applying’ it, increases its importance and signals a clear contribution to the understanding of writing."
Jasper Neel analyzes the emerging field of composition studies within the epistemological and ontological debate over writing precipitated by Plato, who would have us abandon writing entirely, and continued by Derrida, who argues that all human beings are written. This book offers a three-part exploration of that debate. In the first part, a deconstructive reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, Neel shows the elaborate sleight-of-hand that Plato must employ as he uses writing to engage in a semblance of spoken dialogue.
The second part describes Derrida’s theory of writing and presents his famous argument that "the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been. . .the debasement of writing, and its repression outside full speech." A lexicon of nine Derridean terms, the key to his theory of writing, is also included. At the end of this section, Neel turns deconstruction against itself, demonstrating that Derridean analysis collapses of its own weight.
The concluding section of the book juxtaposes the implications of Platonic and Derridean views of writing, warning that Derrida’s approach may lock writing inside philosophy. The conclusion suggests that writing may be liberated from philosophical judgment by turning to Derrida’s predecessors, the sophists, particularly Protagoras and Gorgias. Drawing on Protagoras’s idea of strong discourse, Neel shows that sophistry is the foundation of democracy: "Strong discourse is public discourse, which, though based on probability and not truth, remains persuasive over a long period of time to a great number of people. This publicly tested discourse exists only among competitors, never alone, but its ability to remain persuasive even when surrounded by other discourses enables the ideas of democracy to emerge and then keeps democracy alive."
A Global Analysis of Sites, Practices, and Processes of Decolonial and Indigenous Meaning-Making
Decolonial projects can end up reinforcing dominant modes of thinking by shoehorning understandings of Indigenous and non-Western traditions within Eurocentric frameworks. The pluralization of literacies and the creation of so-called alternative rhetorics accepts that there is a totalizing reality of rhetoric and literacy. This volume seeks to decenter these theories and to engage Indigenous contexts on their own terms, starting with the very tools of representation. Language itself can disrupt normative structures and create pluriversal possibilities. The volume editors and contributors argue for epistemic change at the level of the language and media that people use to represent meaning. The range of topics covered includes American Indian and Indigenous representations, literacies, and rhetorics; critical revisionist historiography and comparative rhetorics; delinking colonial literacies of cartographic power and modernity; “northern” and “southern” hemispheric relations; and theorizations of/from oceanic border spaces.
The turbulent history of the United States has provided a fertile ground for conspiracies, both real and imagined. From the American Revolution to the present day, conspiracy discourse—linguistic and symbolic practices and artifacts revolving around themes, claims, or accusations of conspiracy—has been a staple of political rhetoric. Some conspiracy theories never catch on with the public, while others achieve widespread popularity. Whether successful or not, the means by which particular conspiracy theories spread is a rhetorical process, a process in which persuasive language, symbolism, and arguments act upon individual minds within concrete historical and political settings.
Conspiracy rhetoric was a driving force in the evolution of antebellum political culture, contributing to the rise and fall of the great parties in the nineteenth century. One conspiracy theory in particular—the "slave power" conspiracy—was instrumental in facilitating the growth of the young Republican Party's membership and ideology. The Political Style of Conspiracy analyzes the concept and reality of the "slave power" in the rhetorical discourse of the mid-nineteenth-century, in particular the speeches and writing of politicians Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. By examining their mainstream texts, Pfau reveals that, in addition to the "paranoid style" of conspiracy rhetoric that inhabits the margins of political life, Lincoln, Chase, and Sumner also engaged in a distinctive form of conspiracy rhetoric that is often found at the center of mainstream American society and politics.
A friendly critique of the field, The Politics of Writing Studies examines a set of recent pivotal texts in composition to show how writing scholarship, in an effort to improve disciplinary prestige and garner institutional resources, inadvertently reproduces structures of inequality within American higher education. Not only does this enable the exploitation of contingent faculty, but it also puts writing studies—a field that inherently challenges many institutional hierarchies—in a debased institutional position and at odds with itself.
Instead of aligning with the dominant paradigm of research universities, where research is privileged over teaching, theory over practice, the sciences over the humanities, and graduate education over undergraduate, writing studies should conceive itself in terms more often associated with labor. By identifying more profoundly as workers, as a collective in solidarity with contingent faculty, writing professionals can achieve solutions to the material problems that the field, in its best moments, wants to address. Ultimately, the change compositionists want to see in the university will not come from high theory or the social science research agenda; it must come from below.
Offering new insight into a complex issue, The Politics of Writing Studies will be of great interest to writing studies professionals, university administrators, and anyone interested in the political economy of education and the reform of institutions of higher education in America.
Contemporary scholarship illustrates the law’s increasingly powerful role in American life; legal education, in turn, has focused on the problems and techniques of communication. This book addresses these interests through critical study of eight popular trials: the 17th-century trial of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, and the 20th-century trials of Scopes, the Rosenbergs, the Chicago Seven, the Catonsville Nine, John Hinckley, Claus von Bulow, and San Diego Mayor Larry Hedgecock. Such trials spark major public debates, become symbols of public life, and legitimize particular beliefs and institutions. Despite high visibility and drama, however, the popular trial has not received sufficient study as persuasive event. Lying at the intersection of the institutional practices of law and the mass media, the popular trial has confounded study according to the conventional assumptions of scholarship in both law and communication studies.
In Postprocess Postmortem, Kristopher M. Lotier surveys the postprocess era-that-never-was, its end, and its after-lives. Employing cutting-edge digital research tools to track the circulation of texts and shifting scales from the global to the local and back again, he offers a revisionist history of a largely unchronicled past. From one perspective, the history of postprocess might seem to be a history of failure: what could have become The Next Big Thing in composition and writing studies during the 1990s and early 2000s never quite ascended. Today, few writing studies scholars apply the term postprocess to their own research or self-identify with a postprocess movement. And yet, as Lotier demonstrates, numerous core postprocess tenets have attained disciplinary centrality. The result: whether they admit to doing so or not, many contemporary scholars employ a postprocess vocabulary, allowing the ideas underlying this important movement/theory/period/attitude to live on.
Breaking with the still-dominant process tradition in composition studies, post-process theory—or at least the different incarnations of post-process theory discussed by the contributors represented in this collection of original essays—endorses the fundamental idea that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist. Post-process theorists hold that the practice of writing cannot be captured by a generalized process or a "big" theory.
Most post-process theorists hold three assumptions about the act of writing: writing is public; writing is interpretive; and writing is situated. The first assumption is the commonsensical claim that writing constitutes a public interchange. By "interpretive act," post-process theorists generally mean something as broad as "making sense of" and not exclusively the ability to move from one code to another. To interpret means more than merely to paraphrase; it means to enter into a relationship of understanding with other language users. And finally, because writing is a public act that requires interpretive interaction with others, writers always write from some position or some place. Writers are never nowhere; they are "situated."
Leading theorists and widely published scholars in the field, contributors are Nancy Blyler, John Clifford, Barbara Couture, Nancy C. DeJoy, Sidney I. Dobrin, Elizabeth Ervin, Helen Ewald, David Foster, Debra Journet, Thomas Kent, Gary A. Olson, Joseph Petraglia, George Pullman, David Russell, and John Schilb.
Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition is a timely exploration of the increasingly widespread and disturbing effect of “post-truth” on public discourse in the United States. Bruce McComiskey analyzes the instances of bullshit, fake news, feigned ethos, hyperbole, and other forms of post-truth rhetoric employed in recent political discourse.
The book frames “post-truth” within rhetorical theory, referring to the classic triad of logos, ethos, and pathos. McComiskey shows that it is the loss of grounding in logos that exposes us to the dangers of post-truth. As logos is the realm of fact, logic, truth, and valid reasoning, Western society faces increased risks—including violence, unchecked libel, and tainted elections—when the value of reason is diminished and audiences allow themselves to be swayed by pathos and ethos. Evaluations of truth are deferred or avoided, and mendacity convincingly masquerades as a valid form of argument.
In a post-truth world, where neither truth nor falsehood has reliable meaning, language becomes purely strategic, without reference to anything other than itself. This scenario has serious consequences not only for our public discourse but also for the study of composition.
Practicing Writing examines a pivotal era in the history of the most ubiquitous-and possibly most problematic-course in North American colleges and universities: the requireAd first-year writing course generally known as “freshman English.”
Thomas Masters's focus is the mid-twentieth century, beginning with the returning waves of World War II veterans attending college on the GI Bill. He then traces the education reforms that took place in the late 1950s after the launch of Sputnik and the establishment of composition as a separate discipline in 1963. This study draws upon archives at three midwestern schools that reflect a range of higher education options: Wheaton, a small, sectarian liberal arts college; Northwestern, a large private university; and Illinois, a large public university.
Practicing Writing gives voice to those whose work is often taken for granted or forgotten in other studies of the subject: freshman English students and their instructors. Masters examines students' papers, professors' letters, and course descriptions, and draws upon interviews conducted with teachers to present the practitioners' points of view.
Unlike other studies of the subject, which have tended to focus more on the philosophy, theory, and ideology of teaching composition and rhetoric, Masters reveals freshman English to be a practice-based phenomenon with a durable ideological apparatus. By reexamining texts that had previously been considered insignificant, he reveals the substance of first-year composition courses and the reasons for their durability.
Walter H. Beale offersthe most coherent treatment of the aims and modes of discourse to be presented in more than a decade. His development of a semiotic “grammar of motives” that relates the problems of meaning in discourse both to linguistic structure and ways of constructing reality stands as a provocative new theory of rhetoric sharply focused on writing.
He includes a comprehensive treatment of rhetoric, its classes and varieties, modes, and strategies. In addition, he demonstrates the importance of the purpose, substance, and social context of discourse, at a time when scholarly attention has become preoccupied with process. He fortifies and extends the Aristotelian approach to rhetoric and discourse at a time when much theory and pedagogy have yielded to modernist assumptions and methods. And finally, he develops a theoretical framework that illuminates the relationship between rhetoric, the language arts, and the human sciences in general.
Illustrates the interweaving of rhetorical and historical forces in shaping public policy
In January 1964, in his first State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson announced a declaration of “unconditional war” on poverty. By the end of the year the Economic Opportunity Act became law.
The War on Poverty illustrates the interweaving of rhetorical and historical forces in shaping public policy. Zarefsky suggest that an important problem in the War on Poverty lay in its discourse. He assumes that language plays a central role in the formulation of social policy by shaping the context within which people view the social world. By terming the anti-poverty effort a war, President Johnson imparted significant symbolism to the effort: it called for total victory and gave confidence that the “war” was winnable. It influenced the definition of the enemy as an intergenerational cycle of poverty, rather than the shortcomings of the individual; and it led to the choice of community action, manpower programs, and prudent management as weapons and tactics. Each of these implications involves a choice of language and symbols, a decision about how to characterize and discuss the world. Zarefsky contends that each of these rhetorical choices was helpful to the Johnson administration in obtaining passage of the Economic Opportunity Ac of 1964, but that each choice invited redefinition or reinterpretation of a symbol in a way that threatened the program.
At the 2003 "Rock the Vote" debate, one of the questions posed by a student to the eight Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination was "have you ever used marijuana?" Amazingly, all but one of the candidates voluntarily answered the question. Add to this example the multiple ways in which we now see public intrusion into private lives (security cameras, electronic access to personal data, scanning and "wanding" at the airport) or private self-exposure in public forums (cell phones, web cams, confessional talk shows, voyeuristic "reality" TV). That matters so private could be treated as legitimate-in some cases even vital-for public discourse indicates how intertwined the realms of private and public have become in our era. Reverse examples exist as well. Around the world, public authorities look the other way while individual rights are abused--calling it a private matter--or officials appeal to sectarian morés to justify discrimination in public policies.
The authors of The Private, the Public, and the Published feel that scholarship needs to explore and understand this phenomenon, and needs to address it in the college classroom. There are consequences of conflating public and private, they argue--consequences that have implications especially for what is known as the public good. The changing distinctions between "private" and "public," and the various practices of private and public expression, are explored in these essays with an eye toward what they teach us about those consequences and implications.
Defense of a poet, and five speeches from after exile.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
The ascending statesman.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
Speeches from turbulent times.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
The early speeches.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
The statesman defends a friend and assails an enemy.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
Peripatetic potpourri.
Aristotle of Stagirus (384–322 BC), the great Greek philosopher, researcher, logician, and scholar, studied with Plato at Athens and taught in the Academy (367–347). Subsequently he spent three years in Asia Minor at the court of his former pupil Hermeias, where he married Pythias, one of Hermeias’ relations. After some time at Mitylene, he was appointed in 343/2 by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died the following year.
Problems, the third-longest work in the Aristotelian corpus, contains thirty-eight books covering more than 900 problems about living things, meteorology, ethical and intellectual virtues, parts of the human body, and other topics. Although Problems is an accretion of multiple authorship over several centuries, it offers a fascinating technical view of Peripatetic method and thought. Problems, in two volumes, replaces the earlier Loeb edition by Hett, with a text and translation incorporating the latest scholarship.
Peripatetic potpourri.
Aristotle of Stagirus (384–322 BC), the great Greek philosopher, researcher, logician, and scholar, studied with Plato at Athens and taught in the Academy (367–347). Subsequently he spent three years in Asia Minor at the court of his former pupil Hermeias, where he married Pythias, one of Hermeias’ relations. After some time at Mitylene, he was appointed in 343/2 by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died the following year.
Problems, the third-longest work in the Aristotelian corpus, contains thirty-eight books covering more than 900 problems about living things, meteorology, ethical and intellectual virtues, parts of the human body, and other topics. Although Problems is an accretion of multiple authorship over several centuries, it offers a fascinating technical view of Peripatetic method and thought. Both Problems, in two volumes, and Rhetoric to Alexander replace the earlier Loeb edition by Hett and Rackham, with texts and translations incorporating the latest scholarship.
In Process This, Nancy DeJoy argues that even recent revisions to composition studies, cultural studies, service learning, and social process movements--continue to repress the subjects and methodologies that should be central, especially at the level of classroom practice. Designed to move student discourses beyond the classroom, these approaches nonetheless continue to position composition students (and teachers) as mere consumers of the discipline. This means that the subjects, methodologies, and theory/practice relationships that define the field are often absent in composition classrooms.
Arguing that the world inside and outside of the academy cannot be any different if the profession stays the same, DeJoy creates a pedagogy and a plan for faculty development that revisions the prewrite/write/rewrite triad to open spaces for participation and contribution to all members of first-year writing classrooms.
In Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Susan Peck MacDonald tackles important and often controversial contemporary questions regarding the rhetoric of inquiry, the social construction of knowledge, and the professionalization of the academy. MacDonald argues that the academy has devoted more effort to analyzing theory and method than to analyzing its own texts. Professional texts need further attention because they not only create but are also shaped by the knowledge that is special to each discipline. Her assumption is that knowledge-making is the distinctive activity of the academy at the professional level; for that reason, it is important to examine differences in the ways the professional texts of subdisciplinary communities focus on and consolidate knowledge within their fields.
Throughout the book, MacDonald stresses her conviction that academics need to do a better job of explaining their text-making axioms, clarifying their expectations of students at all levels, and monitoring their own professional practices. MacDonald’s proposals for both textual and sentence-level analysis will help academic professionals better understand how they might improve communication within their professional communities and with their students.
American culture warriors have plenty to argue about, but battles over such issues as abortion and torture have as much to do with rhetorical style as moral substance. Cathleen Kaveny reframes the debate about religion in the public square by focusing on a powerful stream of religious discourse in American political speech: the Biblical rhetoric of prophetic indictment.
“Important and path-breaking. The place of religious discourse in the American public square has received much attention for many years, but the role of prophetic indictment has been largely overlooked. Kaveny’s book not only opens a ‘new front’ in these debates, but starts the conversation with a rich analysis of the history and function of prophetic discourse.”
—Kathleen A. Brady, Commonweal
“A monumental achievement, and a much-needed addition to the academic and societal conversation about the role of religion in public life. In precise prose and with careful analysis, Kaveny challenges some of the leading theorists about public discourse and puts forward her own theories, all accompanied by a storyteller’s gift for anecdote and a philosopher’s talent for explication.”
—Michael Sean Winters, National Catholic Reporter
In Prophets, Gurus, and Pundits, author Anna M. Young proposes that the difficulty of bridging the gap between intellectuals and the public is not a failure of ideas; rather, it is an issue of rhetorical strategy. By laying a rhetorical foundation and presenting analytical case studies of contemporary “public intellectuals,” Young creates a training manual for intellectuals who seek to connect with a public audience and effect change writ large.
Young begins by defining key aspects of rhetorical style before moving on to discuss the specific ways in which intellectuals may present ideas to a general audience in order to tackle large-scale social problems. Next, she defines the ways in which five crucial turning points in our nation—the rise of religious fundamentalism, a growing lack of trust in our institutions, the continued destruction of the environment, the ubiquity of media and information in our daily lives, and the decline of evidence-based reasoning—have set the stage for opportunities in the current public-intellectual dialogue.
Via case studies of such well-known personalities as Deepak Chopra and Professor Cornel West, Young goes on to reveal the six types of public intellectuals who achieve success in presenting scholarly ideas to audiences at large:
The Prophet presents the public’s sins for contemplation, then offers a path to redemption.
The Guru shepherds his or her flock to enlightenment and a higher power.
The Sustainer draws upon our natural and human resources to proffer solutions for social, political, and ecological systems.
The Pundit utilizes wit and brevity to bring crucial issues to the attention of the public.
The Narrator combines a variety of perspectives to create a story the average person can connect with and understand.
The Scientist taps into the dreams of the public to offer ideas from above and beyond the typical scope of public discourse.
At once a rallying cry and roadmap, The Politics of Thinking Out Loud draws upon rhetorical expertise and analysis of contemporary public intellectuals to offer a model for scholars to effectively engage the public—and in doing so, perhaps forever change the world in which we live.
Wolfgang Mieder, widely considered the world’s greatest proverb scholar, here considers the role of proverbial speech on the American political stage from the Revolutionary War to the present. He begins his survey by discussing the origins and characteristics American proverbs and their spread across the globe hand in hand with America’s international political role. He then looks at the history of the defining proverb of American democracy, "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Subsequent essays consider such matters as Abigail Adams’s masterful use of politically charged proverbs; the conversion of the biblical proverb "a house divided against itself cannot stand" into a political expression; Frederick Douglass’s proverbial prowess in the battle against racial injustice; how United States presidents have employed proverbial speech in their inaugural addresses; and the proverbial language in the World War II correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, which sharpened their communication and helped forge bonds of cooperation. Mieder concludes with an insightful, relevant examination of the significance of the ambiguous proverb "good fences make good neighbors."
The nature of Puritanism in America and the role of emotion in religion is the subject of this important and useful collection of five religious orations, discussed and appraised by Professor White for students of Puritanism and rhetoric. The five orations presented here consist of three by Jonathan Edwards, “Future Punishment,” “Distinguishing Marks,” and “The Nature of the Affections”; one by Charles Chauncy, “Enthusiasm Described and Caution’d Against”; and one by Ebenezer Gay, “Natural Religion, as Distinguished from Revealed.”
In the first or introductory part of the book, Professor White discusses in considerable detail the broader implications of the confrontation between rationalists and revivalists in New England, represented by the following orations, during this most important upheaval in the Colonies prior to the Revolution. The orations themselves are arranged to represent the force and counterforce of reason versus emotionalism and the precarious balance maintained momentarily and, eventually, lost. And in the third part of the book Professor White provides critical analysis and suggested appraisal for further interpretation and inquiry.
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