Suggests that the writings of Isocrates offer an example for and an extension of the critical rhetoric project. Notes that Isocrates's combination of critique and service urges rhetors to act as critical servants. Concludes that the critic's reading of the community's history reunites the individual and the social, theory and practice, critique…

Outlines the rhetorical contributions of Walter Benjamin, who attempted to develop a social critique arguing for the decisive function of critical intervention. Suggests Benjamin's insights about the liberatory role of the engaged social agent warrant closer attention. Proposes his ideas provide useful avenues for examining contemporary texts and…

Revisits the hemisphericity theory of the 1970s and the revised and less familiar accounts that emerged in the 1980s. Argues that neither the older nor the newer psychobiological accounts of mind support the Neoclassical/Romantic claims. Contends that these accounts are more congenial to an Aristotelian theory of mind and rhetoric. (RS)

Shows how sophistic rhetoric can be, and has been, understood as a plausible result of relative and nihilistic attitudes toward the possibility of knowledge. Provides an overview of Sextus Empiricus' pyrrhonean or practical skepticism to show how it resembles sophism and rejects rhetoric. Suggests that the relative and negative epistemologies are…

Replies to an article in this issue that responds to an earlier article by these authors. Replies aesthetically in aphorisms, subsuming philosophical argument within a vortex of figuration and thus troping the knowledge drive while privileging "doxa" over "episteme." (SR)

Argues that oppositional thinking, if handled in the right way, will serve as a way to avoid the very problems that Jonathan Culler and Paul de Mann are troubled by: "purity, order, and hierarchy." Asserts that binary thinking can serve to encourage difference--indeed, encourage nondominance, nontranscendence, instability, and disorder.…

Reviews five major objections that have been lodged against the systems view. Pursues two further objections, which may be instrumental as reversal points for rehabilitating the systems approach. Argues for a radically revised view of systems that could have a significant impact on historical scholarship and pedagogy in rhetoric. (RS)

Uses G. Deleuze and F. Guattari's radical strategies of constantly decentering and recoding categorical terms to flee dialectics that organize bodies and sexualities to read across Monique Wittig's equally radical veerings into "thought-events." (RS)

Explores the methodology of rhetorical reasoning by looking to J. H. Newman's "Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent." Looks at how Newman prefigures S. Toulmin and C. Perelman, both of whom are interested in how rhetorical reasoning operates and why it is well suited to redress the limitations of formal logic. (TB)

In this article, the author describes a project designed to take the dread out of discussion in a first-year interdisciplinary humanities course at Sewanee: The University of the South, a private liberal arts college in Tennessee. The Responsible Intellectual Discussion project, known as RID, was created in conjunction with the college's Eloquence…

Writing courses are increasingly popular in higher education. This paper presents a pedagogic approach that combines theory and practice, in an accessible way, to help students appreciate the interrelation of styles and contexts, and develop skills for writing in a range of genres. The approach is characterised as "adaptive application".…

For generations, critics have dismissed James Forman's "Black Manifesto" as a rhetorical failure. Such judgments tend to focus on the prophetic and retributive registers of the speech and fail to account for the full range of its ironic structuration. By examining the complex interchange of prophetic, retributive, and tragic registers through…

The notion of links or connections among nodes or pieces of information sorted in a computer has changed throughout the brief history of hypertext. Originally, links were either thought to be semantic or functional in nature; that is, they were between meaningful information or they performed certain activities. Recently, links are beginning to be…

Robert L. Scott's article "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic" exemplifies agonistic-transcendent rhetoric in that it sought to revalue "rhetoric." However, as Scott has already noted, his project was ultimately compromised by his not revaluing "epistemic" in conjunction. Scott's article is criticized with respect to…

Examines the rhetorical function of the 1945 photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima as it is appropriated in a number of recent editorial cartoons. Builds upon rhetorical theory addressing repetitive form and visual metaphor to propose a concept of representative form. Argues that the parodied Iwo Jima image operates as an instance of…