David Fleming

Collaborative Argument across the Visual-Verbal Interface.

The essay begins with an intellectual framework for describing a visual‐verbal interface. Applying the implications of the framework to collaborative work, the authors illustrate ways in which they used this framework to observe and teach collaborative teams of graphic designers.

THE STREETS OF THURII: DISCOURSE, DEMOCRACY, AND DESIGN IN THE CLASSICAL POLIS

Abstract The Creek colony of Thurii, founded in southern Italy around 444, BCE, was apparently planned to be a model polis. Any reconstruction of that plan must be speculative, but the stories about Thurii suggest that its design incorporated three entities not usually linked — a democratic constitution, an orthogonal street layout, and a rhetorically‐oriented educational system. In trying to understand what these things might have had to do with one another, I examine the thought of three individuals who, sources tell us, participated in the colony: the rhêtor Pericles, who apparently instigated the project; the designer Hippodamus, who supposedly laid out its streets; and the sophist Protagoras, who reportedly wrote its laws. If indeed these three collaborated on Thurii, what they may have sought there was a “bounded”; democracy, a community of free and equal citizens, governed by open, transparent, and agonistic means but guided by an unmistakable sense of rightness, something manifest not only in the towns constitution but in its educational system and built space as well.

Measuring the Motivation to Charter: An Examination of School Sponsors in Texas.

ABSTRACT Charter school reforms are predicated on the existence of motivated groups or individuals that create these public schools of choice. Rhetoric concerning charter schools largely takes for granted the supply side and assumes that market forces will compel educational entrepreneurs to open schools. We argue that the motivations of charter school founders are variable and have important implications for the charter school landscape. Examining data on charter school sponsors in Texas, we estimate the impact of sponsor characteristics on the makeup of the student populations these schools serve. We apply a latent class analysis to measure motivation as an underlying variable whose outcomes we observe as qualitatively different sponsors. The analysis distinguishes between three groups of sponsors: those motivated in their capacity as school districts, those seeking to provide a general alternative to traditional district-run public education, and those offering a special service. The results suggest to policymakers that charter schools are diverse entities of education providers that serve different students.

Quintilian, Progymnasmata, and Rhetorical Education Today

ABSTRACT There has been a surge of scholarly interest lately in the progymnasmata, those ordered exercises in composition that played such an important role in rhetorical education from antiquity to the Renaissance. Comprising an integrated program in literary, civic, and moral effectiveness, they offer a compelling alternative to language arts pedagogy today, which seems too often driven by the goal of “college and career readiness.” But to be truly useful as a pedagogical model, the progymnasmata need to be embedded in something like the comprehensive educational philosophy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.

March 1865: The End of Elegance

Lincolns Second Inaugural Address is a well-known and much-analyzed speech. But one prominent feature, its use of chiasmus (or inverse repetition), has gone largely unremarked, as it has gone largely unremarked in analyses of Lincolns thought and language more generally. If chiasmus was important for Lincoln, however, it is curiously absent at a key moment in the Second Inaugural—the end of the third paragraph. Why? To answer that question is to understand something important about Lincolns political and rhetorical ideology.

The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity, Jeffrey Walker

In his landmark 1941 paper “The Aristotelian Tradition in Ancient Rhetoric,” Friedrich Solmsen repeats a story told by both Cicero and Quintilian about how, after the first generation of Greek rhetoricians developed the art, its study and teaching split into two streams: one represented by Aristotle, the other by Isocrates. All later development of the field was marked by those “two outstanding theorists.” Having introduced this two-stream account, Solmsen then explores only one, arguing that the Aristotelian tradition is nearer to his line of work and that its materials lie closer to hand. He is careful not to suggest that once that approach is brought to light, “the Isocratean may be found by a process of subtraction”; but he does claim that when the “first half of the job of analysis has been done,” the other element will be more obvious. Solmsen, of course, never got around to that other element, though he lived fifty more years. One suspects that he never intended to give Isocrates the same treatment he gave Aristotle. The neglect is par for the course in modern rhetorical studies. In texts that were influential in the late twentieth-century revival of classical rhetoric among US compositionists, George Kennedy portrayed the Isocratean tradition as little more than a “continuation of sophistry,” claiming that its main method of instruction was imitation and its interest in theory, slight. According to Kennedy, Isocrates (unlike Aristotle) emphasized written discourse over spoken, epideictic over deliberative and judicial, style over argument, and amplification over forcefulness––all hallmarks of “secondary rhetoric,” the form the art takes when it is practiced chiefly in classrooms rather than the public sphere. In Kennedy’s classification only the Platonic and Aristotelian systems are deemed “philosophical,” despite the fact that philosophia is precisely what Isocrates claimed to profess his whole career. Adding irony to insult, for much of European history, it was the Isocratean stream of rhetoric, not the Aristotelian, that most nourished higher education. In a famous chapter of his study Paideia, Werner Jaeger said of Isocrates that