Debra Hawhee

Burke and Nietzsche

The essay examines the “becoming‐Nietzsche” of Kenneth Burke by exploring the complex linkages between Burke and Nietzsche, particularly those forged by Burke in the 1920s and 30s while formulating his well‐known concepts: perspective by incongruity, motive, terministic screens, and dramatism. An understanding of the ways Nietzsches philosophy helped shape Burkes views on the nature of language (metaphor, writing, poetry), and the effects language produces, enables a different understanding of central passages in Permanence and Change, Burke the critic, and by extension, the development of rhetoric as a discipline.

Rhetorics, Bodies, and Everyday Life

This article reflects on potential pedagogical implications of Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece by connecting it with other recent publications on rhetorics rhetoric, space, mobility, as instantiated in everyday practices. The resulting account considers words, images, and bodies as part of the rhetorical enterprise.

Rhetoric's Sensorium

This essay reflects on the last 100 years of sensation in the journal to figure out where and when scholars in the field have concerned themselves with sensuous activity, how that activity is seen to interact with language, knowledge, and speech. The past can serve to some extent as a “rough guide,” showing gaps and leaps as well as modeling specific approaches.

Burke on Drugs

Abstract This essay contributes to the growing body of historical research on Kenneth Burke by considering his work as a drug researcher for the Bureau of Social Hygiene in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The research he conducted under the watch of his conservative boss, Colonel Arthur Woods, reveals a resistant worker who effectively became hooked on the question of bodies and habits even as he at times explicitly rejected the aims and methods of his boss. Burkes rearticulations of efficiency and piety help show how the Bureau offered new vantages on the body, effectively broadening his critical compass.

Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory

This somatic genealogy of Dramatisms core terms—symbolic action, attitude, identification—argues for the importance of keeping rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical pedagogy more closely tied to bodies that generate, induce, and respond to rhetoric. It does so by examining Burkes use of Sir Richard Pagets theory that spoken language derives from the use and development of bodily gestures. An examination of Pagets theory in Burkes early work serves as a jarring reminder that rhetoric is always a joint performance of body and mind.

Toward a Bestial Rhetoric

In 1993, my fi rst full year as a master’s student studying rhetoric at the University of Tennessee, the venerable George Kennedy visited campus. He was part of a star-studded interdisciplinary symposium on rhetoric (Page duBois and Th omas Cole were the other two guests), and if memory serves, the large crowd awaiting Kennedy’s talk stirred with anticipation; this event was two years after the publication of a much-needed and now indispensible translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric . After the talk, it stirred with something more like befuddlement. Kennedy’s talk, “A Hoot in the Dark,” shared a title with an essay he had published in Philosophy and Rhetoric the year prior. Th e subject? Animal rhetoric. I don’t recall many specifi cs from the talk apart from Kennedy’s opening with his crow-watching habits in Chapel Hill, but I do recall the real-time responses. Th ere were whispers, sidelong glances, and muttering, all of which bespoke a slight panic about his—and the fi eld’s—direction. What was Kennedy doing? Was our distinguished leader, translator of the Sage himself, going off some deep end and taking the discipline with him? By the time he visited our campus, Kennedy had no doubt become accustomed to such responses, having been greeted on at least one occasion with a wry “Dr. Doolittle, I presume?” 1 Indeed, such responses to this direction in Kennedy’s writing had been circulating through the fi eld proper even before “A Hoot” appeared in print. In his preface to Writing Histories of Rhetoric , Victor Vitanza attests to the shockwaves: “Prior to [the article’s] appearance, I had heard through the grapevine that Kennedy had written a ‘wild,’ perhaps savage, article. And indeed, he has” (1994, ix). Vitanza goes on to characterize his reading of the article as “‘undecidable,’ because while rereading its title and the text itself, I cannot still decide if Kennedy (or ‘energy’) wrote it seriously or farcically with beak in cheek. ... Perhaps, like Aristotle, Kennedy is exploring the various possible ways, or paths” (1994, x).

Case Studies in Material Rhetoric: Joseph Priestley and Gilbert Austin

This essay offers “material rhetoric” as a new addition to the usual list of categories used to describe rhetoric in the eighteenth century (neoclassical, belletristic, elocutionary, epistemological/psychological) by examining the material elements of treatises written by Joseph Priestley and Gilbert Austin. Those material elements—namely heat, passion, and impression—are tracked through Priestley and Austin9s scientific writings, thereby positioning their particular strains of material rhetoric as legacies of philosophical chemistry.

Review Essay: Sustainable Scholarship and the Rhetoric of Medicine

Timothy Edgar, Seth M. Noar, and Vicki S. Freimuth, ed., Communication Perspectives on HIV/AIDS for the 21st Century (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates/Taylor & Francis Group, 2008), xxix + 477...

REVIEW ESSAY: Somatography

Frederick Douglass’s account of his first ‘‘invited’’ speech in ‘‘My Bondage and My Freedom’’ includes a snippet of rhetorical criticism, auto-criticism if you will. After writing about his being sought out by the abolitionist William C. Coffin at a summer 1841 anti-slavery convention in Nantucket, Douglass recounts how he was ‘‘induced to speak out the feelings inspired by the occasion,’’ to offer ‘‘fresh recollection’’ of what he had endured as a slave. His account, remarkably, begins with what he can’t in fact recall: ‘‘My speech on this occasion is about the only one I ever made,’’ begins the auto-criticism, ‘‘of which I do not remember a single connected sentence.’’ He continues:

Performing Ancient Rhetorics: A Symposium

ABSTRACT In the introduction to this special issue, Hawhee sets the stage for the scholarly performances featured at the 2005 Pittsburgh symposium on ancient rhetoric by describing the context and foregrounding the lectures/essays contained in this issue. She notes the shift to questions of performing rhetoric and considers that shift in relation to disciplinary identities which, she asserts, function performatively.