Edwin Black's essay on "The Second Persona," introduced to rhetorical critics a rationale and model for a type of ideological criticism. Because it ignored the role of pathos in both the rhetoric Black purported to critique and in the construction of his own audience, Black's essay mis-described key features of Robert Welch's "Blue Book", which…

The 25th anniversary of the founding of ACT UP provides a moment to reflect on the group's unquestionably profound effects on the management of HIV/AIDS, the queer community, the history of social movements in this country, and even the development of queer theory in the academy. But it should also encourage individuals to consider the ways in…

This essay explores Barack Obama's invocation of the Exodus during his 2008 presidential campaign. It argues Obama's turn to Exodus, his rare embodiment of Joshua, and his renewal of the American covenant nicely addressed major rhetorical problems that he faced. Of equal importance, his campaign oratory opens an important line of inquiry into the…

Throughout his administration, FDR engaged in a complex set of arguments that worked together to defend democracy in general as a viable form of government; American democracy as the highest expression of democratic government; the primacy of the federal government as the most efficient and effective locus of democratic power; and the executive…

Debates regarding higher education's relevance and responsiveness to societal exigencies have in the past three decades resulted in the development of programs with leitmotifs such as "service learning," "problem-based learning," and "civic engagement" (e.g., "Scholarship on Teaching and Learning," McNair…

Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been celebrated for her astute rhetorical contributions to woman's rights advocacy and highly criticized for her racist and elitist sentiments about citizenship and the franchise. Although there appears to be a discontinuity between Cady Stanton's commitment to (sexual) equality and her racism/elitism, this tension is…

The mainstream press frequently characterized the election of President Barack Obama, the first African American US President, as the realization of Martin Luther King's dream, thus crafting a postracial narrative of national transcendence. I argue that this routine characterization of Obama's election functions as a site for the production of…

Publics are not simply a product of common attention to texts, but are also animated by an economy of tropes and affects that relies on processes of metonymic connection, metaphorical condensation, and affective investment. Drawing on Jacques Lacan's theory of enjoyment and his treatments of metaphor and metonymy as rhetorical forms, this essay…

The logic of political economy depends on a domestic metaphor, using the "oikos" or household as a model for the "polis." Historically, this metaphor has imagined citizens as the children of a paternal state. However during the 2008 housing crisis, this metaphor was turned upside down, depicting citizens as the parents of infantile state…

This tropological analysis of "On the Equality of the Sexes" (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's "dialectical" irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the…

Faced with a racialized political crisis that threatened to derail his campaign to become the first African American president of the United States, Barack Obama delivered a speech on race titled "A More Perfect Union." He begins by portraying himself as an embodiment of double consciousness, but then invites his audience to share his…

Few contemporary scholars have explicitly discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric. This essay draws on the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that rhetoricians have been reluctant to theorize love for two reasons: first, it is already implied in the widely accepted concept of identification; and second, any explicit…

For generations, critics have dismissed James Forman's "Black Manifesto" as a rhetorical failure. Such judgments tend to focus on the prophetic and retributive registers of the speech and fail to account for the full range of its ironic structuration. By examining the complex interchange of prophetic, retributive, and tragic registers through…

As a rhetorical figure, the example is constitutively split between the structural vocations of the Greek "paradeigma" (emphasizing illumination and belonging) and the Latin "exemplum" (emphasizing detachment and exclusion). This bifurcation enables the example to function as a strategic resource of ambiguity. Christine de…

The focus of this paper is domestic propaganda. The author presents comprehensive reviews of four books: (1) "Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic" by Randall L. Bytwerk (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004); (2) "Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda…