Mari Lee Mifsud

Dialogic, dialectic, and rhetoric: Exploring human dialogue across the discipline

In the communication discipline, human dialogue is studied by both social scientists and humanists. Social scientists situate dialogue in dialectic; humanists situate dialogue in rhetoric. Generally, their work proceeds without acknowledgment of the other, perpetuating what we identify as central concerns for the discipline: (a) The isolation of dialectic and rhetoric as distinct subjects of analysis; (b) the theoretical antagonism of dialectic and rhetoric; (c) the political antagonism of the humanistic and social scientific sides of the discipline; and (d) the stabilization of both the theory of human dialogue and the methods used to study it. This essay problematizes the study of human dialogue in the communication discipline and suggests that future directions in dialogic theory and research show ways of engaging dialectic and rhetoric in an authentic rather than antagonistic dialogue.

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.

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?

A Review of: “Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece.”

well-argued study. Wood gathers and analyzes an appropriately diverse set of archival materials to build a sophisticated history. She moves easily between national and local contexts, taking special care to highlight the experiences of individual communities by mining an impressive array of data found in county and city records and local newspapers. In this way, Wood offers the reader a rich picture of the landscape of lynching at its most specific. For example, she explores the arrival of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in Atlanta by noting that it opened just a few months after the highly publicized lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman. In addition, she offers an account of an early screening of the film in Atlanta, at which 100 Confederate veterans could be heard shouting the rebel yell during key scenes. Such detail reminds us that public culture is often performed and experienced locally. As a study in visual culture, the book effectively engages visual politics at all levels. Wood addresses issues of production by exploring how photographers came to photograph lynching spectacles and by tracing the early history of film. She skillfully reads the visual texts themselves in terms of their composition and content. She tracks the circulation of photographs and film and, as chronicled above, engages response and reception through situated studies of local audiences. A study combining a few of these approaches would be commendable; one that successfully accomplishes all of them is especially notable. Exploring the complex role that both photography and film played in the representation of lynching and the circulation of lynching imagery, Lynching and Spectacle makes it painfully clear that the history of lynching in the United States is inextricably bound up with a history of its popular media. This might be a fact that communication scholars lament, but it is one we cannot ignore.