Arabella Lyon

Rhetorical Authority in Athenian Democracy and the Chinese Legalism of Han Fei

Han Fei, quoted above, is one of the few early Chinese philosophers to address persuasion specifically and at length, and hence he provides a fine entry point into comparative questions of rhetorical authority and negotiation: Where does rhetorical authority lie? Does the role of the rhetor differ in democracies and authoritarian states? How does the institutional placement of power affect rhetoric and its theories? What are the possible relationships between the rhetor and the audience? The assumption of a powerful rhetor depends on a common Western as sumption of equality between the rhetor and the audience?equality in one of the many senses of the word, moral, civic, humanistic, spiritual, intellectual, and physical?as well as dominance of the rhetors speech act over the audi ence and scene. This assumption is common with modernity and exists at other times, but it is not a universal assumption, and it is always a rhetoricians ideal. The nature of rhetoric and rhetorical theory, for most of the world through all of human time, is more complex. To examine alternative assumptions about power dynamics and the nature of political speech acts, I will be reading Han Fei (?289-233 B.C.E.), who offers Western rhetoricians a corrective to their limited emphasis. In theorizing a state ruled by law, he offers three models of speech act each based on a different rhetor/audience dynamic.1 In considering where to place authority for action, I also am concerned with defining the relationship between speech and act within rhetorical situa tions. Defining an act as requiring intent and result (Lyon 1998, 3-8), I have often simply accepted Kenneth Burkes model of speech act. Burke argues that

Special Issue on Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing

Rhetoric scholars have developed approaches to both civil and human rights as political, ethical, and academic discourses. Such approaches include examining the development and reproduction of hierarchies, the politics of representation, and the relationships among symbols, audiences consisting of disparate communities, rights, and rights events. After an overview of rhetorical contributions, as well as risks and limitations of a rhetoric approach to human rights, this introduction turns to the focus of the special issue: testifying and witnessing as a way to scrutinize the roles of bystanders to rights atrocities and the responses of listeners who may be rights committed or not.

Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement

decline (135). Within Assata, Corrigan explains, “writing and reproduction intersected and created the possibility for women to perform essential tasks of the revolution, which pitted them against the black men within their organizations as well as against the white state” (133). Corrigan sees this intersection in Shakur’s writings where the activist frames her story “as a moment of (re)birth” for the movement (139). Shakur’s social critiques, Corrigan continues, functioned to link domestic and global forms of oppression, demonstrating the interconnectedness of marginalization. Her personal account of her pregnancy situated women as crucial actors in the struggle for black empowerment. In the face of deteriorating social conditions, Corrigan sees Shakur’s autobiography as a call for increased mobilization against state-sponsored violence against people of color, the next phase of the Black freedom struggle. In Prison Power, Lisa Corrigan makes an important contribution to contemporary understandings of Black Power, mass incarceration, and social activism. The book should find wide readership in communication and rhetorical studies along with related fields like African American studies, philosophy, gender studies, criminal justice, and history. The organization and engaging style make Corrigan’s argument accessible and convincing. This book will find a place in many reading lists because of its ability to analyze historical texts in a manner that so clearly speaks to topics that surface daily in classrooms and graduate seminars around the nation. Imprisoned and exiled Black Power activists, Corrigan suggests, continue to resonate with contemporary publics because they “offer a voice of reproach for mass incarceration in the United States and beyond, linking the history of slavery to American military occupation abroad and to a larger policy of imprisonment throughout the world” (148). In an age of increased activism and heightened awareness of injustice, Corrigan’s book offers insights into the crucial role of prison and prison writings in efforts to mobilize publics for change.

Student Needs and Strong Composition: The Dialectics of Writing Program Reform

politics drives curriculum, that we live within institutions that must continuously account for the political in order to maintain enrollments, budgets, public goodwill.... so that a genuine force for positive change in the ways and means by which writing is taught is possible only when we take stock of the politics of writing instruction and begin to enter consciously and knowledgeably into the political arena (xix-xx).

Manifesting a Future for Comparative Rhetoric

In early June 2013, a group of rhetoric and composition scholars gathered in Lawrence, Kansas, to take part in a comparative rhetoric seminar, part of the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer In...

Paideia to Pedantry: The Dissolving Relationship of the Humanities and Society

The changing relationship of humanist education and society may be traced through historical changes in the relationship of formal education to technical writing. Technical writing with its intrinsic social purposes provides a powerful metaphor for the needs of society, and the resistance of the modern English department to applied writing provides evidence of the growing separation of society and the humanities. From classical philosophies of education through the humanist movement of the Renaissance, education was committed to the development of ideal leadership. Both classical and Renaissance humanists were epistolographers and public orators, meeting the needs of their societies. Modern humanists focus on the individual and the text. While Western culture from ancient Greece to the Renaissance educated citizens to specific service in society, the modern humanities are failing to combine utility with the preservation and creation of knowledge. Teachers should emulate the humanities of the past and teach writing as a social force in technology, politics, and business.

The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion

In a demanding engagement, James L. Kastely offers an exquisite reading, even revision, of the Republic, and through nuanced attention to form, absences, and tangents he begins to answer a methodological question that I have had for a while (Lyon). The Gorgias ends with a failed elenchus, when no one will continue, and then in a methodological shift after the Republic’s first chapter, Plato makes explicit his dissatisfaction with elenchus. Rather than ignore what seemingly stopped Plato twice, Professor Kastely explicates a new, more dialogical method by reading the Republic as rhetorical theory (x, xii). The new method and theory are performed in answering the question of whether it possible to have a political discourse that is not simply a displaced pursuit of private interest (3). Through meticulous reading, Kastely explicates Plato’s rhetorical method from the movement between the performative, mimetic Republic, which concedes the multitude, and the ideal, contemplative Kallipolis, which unifies everything, even gender. Between the two, Kastely locates Platonic persuasion: “Persuasion ... can be extended and deepened to being understood as the opportunity and responsibility to shape one’s identity. Persuasion now can be understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220). Constituting persuasion does not manipulate the other, but works to change desire and the internal constitution of the individual. That is, this persuasion remakes desires, values, and identities (Frankenstein’s operation). Kastely considers reconstitution as dialogic and participatory and thus better than manipulative, orator-centric persuasion in that re-constitutive persuasion alters and expands “our understanding of what constitutes political discourse” to include foundational values (10–11). Intriguing as this is, I need further evidence for the dialogic nature of constituting persuasion, particularly because it is not achieved through deliberation, but through erasing alternative desires. Given Socrates’ discursive control, belief in Plato’s commitment to dialogue remains difficult, and when I consider the two states together, the Republic and Kallipolis, I instead find that the new method arises through doubleness, a double logos that destabilizes wisdom and sends a frustrated, skeptical reader questing. I offer two examples of Plato’s unresolvable doubleness.

Human Rights Rhetoric

Statues portray ‘‘Freedom from Want’’ and ‘‘Freedom of Speech’’ for a United Nations exhibit by the Office of War Information in Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. This exhibit featured a copy of the Atlantic charter, with amplifiers at each end broadcasting speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-Shek every half hour, and surrounded by statues of the four freedoms. Segment from a larger photograph by Marjory Collins, March 1943. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and Flickr.com. (Retrieve from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/item/fsa1992001537/ PP/ or http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179127293/.) Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 290–293