Daniel M. Gross

Melanchthon’s rhetoric and the practical origins of Reformation human science

At the beginning of the 16th century in Germany, religious ends and human art joined forces to produce a sacred rhetoric: a rhetoric that could transform human nature, and explain at the same time how such transformation was possible according to both science and scripture. No longer was it enough to ask in Scholastic fashion ‘What is man?’ - his essence and unique faculties, his special place in God’s world. A new question took on urgency in the wake of religious reformation, namely ‘What could man become?’ But theology alone could not provide a practical response to this question. Rhetoric, in its various adopted forms, could. Consequently rhetoric emerged as architectonic of the human sciences in Reformation Germany, shaping pedagogy as a practical art. Whereas scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the way in which the exact sciences such as mathematics influenced Enlightenment human science, the history of human science as practical art has received little attention. This article contributes to such a history by showing how rhetoric as a practical protreptic art structured human scientific initiatives in the wake of Philipp Melanchthon’s Reformation pedagogy.

Frameworks for Failure

In the wake of the influential 2011 Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, this article extends the conversation along two related tracks: historical and theoretical. We situate the Framework historically with respect to the philosophies and cultural pressures behind the “habits of mind” structure so central to the text. We then read success against queer theory’s recent turn to negative emotion, notably in Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, and Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure. Our goal is to think about how the Framework can be understood with respect to a longer social turn in writing studies.

The Art of Listening: A Course in the Humanities

Dismissed as a passive behavior that comes naturally, listening is, in fact, a complex and learned activity that can be perfected. Like reading, writing, and speaking, listening as a practical activity is critical for success in college life and beyond. But while rhetoric as the art of speaking has been a basic course in higher education for millennia, rarely if ever has a course in the humanities focused on the art of listening. That is what we did in my spring 2005 upper-division undergraduate course Issues in Rhetoric and Culture: The Art of Listening, which was cross-listed in the departments of Rhetoric, Communication Studies, English, and the University of Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. The goal of this course was to build some practical skills in the art of listening within a humanities context, which might give these practical skills meaning beyond function (e.g., better grades, better job performance, better personal relationships), though these practical goals that so concern undergraduates were honored as well. Ultimately, however, students were expected to gain some critical perspective on the practicalities of listening by way of history and theory. We began by reading the July 31, 2004, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World,” a controversial document coauthored by then cardinal Ratzinger which argues that women are particularly disposed to the virtues of “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.” This Church document was a convenient place to THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LISTENING, 21(1), 72–79 Copyright

Rhetoric and the origins of the human sciences: A Foucauldian tale untold

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault’s famous history of the human sciences focused on “the order of things” and in doing so it overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: pedagogy, politics, and psychology. If we revisit Foucault from a rhetorical perspective there are consequences: (1) at the level of architectonic, we rediscover rhetoric’s role at the inception of the human sciences, and (2) at the level of thematic, we can make better sense of rhetorical phenomena such as the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century sacred arts of listening, which feature a “public ear.” Foucault’s late interest in the pastoral picks up this rhetorical thread, although he never was able to revise the disciplinary and biopolitical history implicated therein. This article initiates just such a revision, paying particular attention to historiographic questions, and to recent discussions of biopower that wind up looking very different from this rhetorical perspective.

Personal identity in the history of ideas: The born-again Christian as a case study

The ‘born-again Christian’ is an idea that lies at the heart of early-modern Lutheranism as well as more recent evangelical Christianity of the sort famously practiced by George W. Bush. It is also, clearly, a way of being: the most unexceptional people can be born again. For scholars negotiating the boundary between intellectual history and cultural studies, the born-again Christian therefore provides a case study illuminating histories of personal identity generally, including identities of nation, location, race, class, gender, and religion. Immediately one notices that a strict history of ideas drawn from Christian doctrine will overstep the important domain of experience, while any cultural studies approach that ignores Christian doctrine will have a hard time explaining what counts as relevant experience and why. A history of identity categories must draw from both approaches. Despite recent efforts in the New dictionary of the history of ideas (2005) to advance a ‘cultural history of ideas,’ however, much work remains as we figure out how exactly this combination should look. When it comes to identity I argue, the missing element is a rhetorical theory of the subject that goes beyond tropology (White) and persuasion (Skinner) to account for horizons of possibility. Ultimately I use Reinhart Koselleck as a foil to advance a Heideggerian rhetorical methodology that situates allegories of the subject in horizons of possibility rather than in structures or traditions alone.