Jane S. Sutton

The taming of Polos/Polis: Rhetoric as an achievement without woman

This essay describes how “rhetoric” came to be written historically in relation to womans body. It shows how rhetoric, etymologically linked with both woman and horse, was progressively “tamed” into a non‐threatening force, and also how rhetoric/woman/horse simultaneously has resisted this taming. Using a collage procedure to cut and paste textual fragments of writing about rhetoric, the essay constructs an archetypal narrative plot that proceeds tropologically—metaphorically, metonymically, synecdochically, and ironcially—to domesticate and unleash rhetoric/woman/horse.

Figuring Rhetoric: From Antistrophe to Apostrophe through Catastrophe

Abstract This essay explores rhetoric tropologically through various strophes: antistrophe, catastrophe, and apostrophe. Our purpose is to delineate problems and possibilities that these tropes pose for rhetoric in an effort to create new rhetorics. We seek to display the antistrophic and catastrophic figurations of rhetoric and then use visual lenses of photography and cinema to disrupt the figurations. Following the disruption, we seek to heighten sensibilities to other figurations, in particular an apostrophic figuration. We cast apostrophe as a figure for change because it marks a deeply felt turn toward difference and otherness. Turned as such, rhetoric becomes erotic.

Rereading sophistical arguments: A political intervention

This essay argues that Aristotles categories of oratory are not as useful in judging the methods of Sophistical rhetoric as his presentation of time. The Sophistical argumentative method of “making the weaker the stronger case” is re-evaluated as a political practice. After showing this arguments relation to power and ideology, Aristotles philosophy, which privileges a procedure of argument consistent with the politics of a polis-ideal rhetoric, is offered as reason for objecting to Sophistical rhetoric. The essay concludes that Sophistical rhetoric prefers the concept of possibility over Aristotelian actuality, and offers a need for an ideological space of radical, generative possibility in rhetorical theory.

Haunted by a Peacock: Discovering, Testing, and Generating Rhetoric in Untimely Ways

In this essay, a peacock represents an “untimely” agent of transformation in an Aristotelian-based rhetoric. The peacock refers to a fragment attributed to Antiphon. This essay identifies and develops two untimely historiographical ways for pursuing an answer to the question, how can sophistical fragments in general and Antiphon’s fragment in particular be employed to generate attractive spaces for the future of rhetoric as an art of civic discourse? The essay is divided into four parts. It begins with a methodological introduction to untimely ways of doing historiography followed by a discussion of the fragment about the peacocks. The third part situates the fragment in a “laboratory” where “equipment” is set up to explore the fragment with untimely ways. The last part of the essay describes how if the peacock’s wing were left alone, rhetoric would be better prepared to look outside of itself into new forms for new functions.

Towards an Alloiostrophic Rhetoric

This article describes the need and outlines a strategy for theorizing “alloiostrophic rhetoric” and the practices and possibilities of such a theory. In brief, alloiostrophic rhetoric is one that turns toward difference, diversity, and the other. It explores this rhetoric by asking three questions: Why is alloiostrophic rhetoric needed? What are its primary characteristics? How might alloiostrophic rhetoric be performed?

Weaving and Unweaving Public Woman: Contingencies of Oppositional Discourse

On December 1895, Amelia “Lizzie” Schauer, a blue-eyed, comely, working-class girl of 17 stepped out of her aunt’s house at 432 Eighteenth Street and began walking to Mrs. Dittmyer’s house at 16(?) First Street in New York. Only moments ago over a small supper Maggie Osterburg had revealed to her niece that she was too poor to keep Amelia any longer; but another one of her aunts, Mrs. Dittmyer, had some money and was willing to pay for her housekeeping services. So, off in the night Amelia went. According to the affidavit, Amelia stopped at a third aunt’s house, Mrs. Raff at 620 Fifth Avenue, and borrowed 10 cents to ride the bridge. Evidently, a family friend, George H. Mackall, who had known Amelia’s grandparents in Germany and who was known in the family as Douglass had agreed to meet Amelia at the bridge and escort her through the city to the Dittmyer residence. Although both Amelia and Douglass arrived at the bridge, their paths, for whatever reason, never crossed. About 10:45 that evening Policeman Oppenheimer saw Amelia walking up First Street. Either Mrs. Dittmyer had moved or Amelia had the wrong address. Either way, she was lost. At 11:30 p.m. Policeman Reagan saw her talking to two men. Amelia, according to her own account, was looking for the house of her aunt and, not seeing the police officer, had stopped to ask directions of a man.