There is a venerable tradition in rhetoric and composition which sees the composing process as a series of decisions and choices.1 However, it is no longer easy simply to assert this position, unless you are prepared to answer a number of questions, the most pressing of which probably is: "What then are the criteria which govern that choice?" Or we could put it another way: "What guides the decisions writers make as they write?" In a recent survey of composition research, Odell, Cooper, and Courts noticed that some of the most thoughtful people in the field are giving us two reasonable but somewhat different answers:
Abstract:This paper is a rhetorical analysis of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, a book of “plain talks” by George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt was a prominent politician in the Tammany machine. These talks expose the inner workings of how politicians become wealthy, how Tammany operated, and how to build a political machine. He rails against his enemies—those in the civil service, the Albany government, and the Republicans, to name a few. Ultimately, Plunkitt’s rhetoric is persuasive due to his use of Irish ethnic and Catholic religious identification, his appeals to the material efficacy of patronage politics, and his populist rhetorical style.
Abstract Dialogism and dialectical knowledge making have long subtended theories of written discourse and therefore the design of rhetoric and writing curricula. As universities move toward interdisciplinary and applied disciplinary epistemologies, theories of written discourse based in the dialogical and dialectical tradition require new scrutiny. This article synthesizes scholarship from the rhetoric of science, written communication theory, and transdisciplinary theory to develop a new poly-logical and poly-lectical approach to written communication for interdisciplinary discourse. The article concludes with examples of hermeneutic and heuristic invention strategies for rhetoric and composition pedagogy that can encourage poly-logical and poly-lectical inquiry on contemporary interdisciplinary issues.
This article shares three focal participant profiles from a national study on graduate student writing pedagogy in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. Working toward a more linguistically just discipline, this research explores how we might teach graduate students disciplinary genre expectations while centering their embodied ways of composing.
Elitza Kotzeva is an Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Armenia (AUA). Her scholarship explores the intersections of material rhetorics, feminist ethnography, and performance theory. In her work, she studies the relationship between the ideological, the rhetorical, and the material. Her writing and translations have appeared in Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style; Material Culture Review; Peitho; Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation; Apofenie ; and edited volumes focusing on gender and rhetoric in East European and Eurasian cultures. Elitza is also an associate editor at the I nternational Exchanges on the Study of Writing Book Series at the WAC Clearinghouse.
The emergence of cinematic novel created by O. Dovzhenko has become one of the chief achievements of Ukrainian culture in the 20th century. The demand for such innovation has been conditioned with the particular place of cinema as an alternative to theatre where the past could be represented at screen in the manner of epic and not dramatic literature. The organic unity of the features of a script and a novel has demonstrated new peculiarities and opportunities of narration. First of all, cinematic novel belongs to the general literary trend of the stream of consciousness that comes back to theatrical soliloquy and builds up a parallel to monodrama. In particular, plot as the determination of events yields to imaginary forces of subjective nature. The comparative research of O. Dovzhenko’s heritage with that of V. Woolf is substantiated with this circumstance. Secondly, it is the so called telegraph style that marks both scripts and cinematic novels coming back still to rhetoric devices of parcellation. The autonomous existence of separate things within cinematic context is presupposed with the effect of alienation ensuing from the phantoms of imagination. Textual dissociation into a series of visions of separate things results in the transformation of linear temporal succession of events into spatial corporeal images marked with multidimensionality. Third, the composition of cinematic novels as well as of other specimens of the stream of consciousness is marked with the traits of spiral narration. The new motivational forces discovered in cinema procured new opportunities for the traditional dramatic problem of fatal predetermination. The formation of cinematic novel has elucidated new interrelation between screen and scene and outlined new perspectives in their interaction.
abstract:This article focuses on a future-oriented Janus face portrayed in Saul Bellow’s short story “A Father-to-Be,” arguing that it builds an exceptional prospective fictional mind in Bellow’s writing with a great emphasis on emotion. Drawing on the “Janus hypothesis,” the article examines how the protagonist’s emotional and imaginative mind interprets the past and processes the present based on a gloomy anticipation of the future, while some previous literary studies on the memory-imagination cognition emphasize the imaginativeness of memory. Affective narratology is largely involved as the supportive explanatory framework in the analysis of the narrative style. The authors approach the structure of the entire story by regarding it as an emotion story and attempt to reveal the aesthetic value of its core narrative by taking emotion both as the force of character forming and as rhetoric.
The Tenebrae Lessons were important components of Holy Week in baroque France. While François Couperin’s (1668–1733) settings of the Tenebrae Lessons hold a significant place in both the repertoire and scholarly literature, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s (1643–1704) voluminous settings of the Tenebrae Lessons deserve a place alongside those by Couperin. This article first outlines the liturgy of the Tenebrae service. Second, it examines the welcoming and influences of the Italian style on the French Leçons de Ténèbres at a time when Lully’s seizure over stage music was complete. Third, it illustrates the influence of secular music-making on this important Liturgical Office. Fourth, it briefly discusses the importance of rhetoric for Charpentier and his contemporaries and rhetoric’s influence on Charpentier’s compositional style of liturgical music.
La cultura fascista è spesso associata con un’attitudine anti-modernista. In realtà, come questo articolo intende dimostrare, tematiche moderniste attraversano costantemente la cultura di estrema destra in Italia come in Francia e in Germania. Diversamente dal libro ormai canonico di Roger Griffin (Modernism and Fascism, 2007), questo articolo non analizza il mito della ‘rigenerazione’ etnico-nazionale (mito che, sostengo, è presente anche nelle prospettive anti-moderniste), ma focalizza in particolare sulla glorificazione culturale dell’industria e della tecnica, e poi sulla riconciliazione dell’arte con lo scenario industriale. Attraverso un’ampia ricognizione del milieu culturale francese, tedesco e italiano, l’articolo presenta al lettore una prima mappatura concernente la complessa relazione fra modernismo e cultura fascista.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
L’interpretatio nominis è da sempre tra gli interessi di Italo Calvino: spie sono i diversi pseudonimi che lo scrittore adottò per sé nel corso degli anni, le indagini ermeneutiche da lui condotte attorno al suo nome, ma soprattutto i ragionamenti riguardanti l’argomento. All'interno del potenziale onomastico offerto dal romanzo Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, non sfugge a chi legge l’accumulo di nomi propri che identificano i personaggi: tra questi sono stati scelti a campione alcuni nomi-spia. Nel romanzo Calvino intrattiene un dialogo anche con la metaonomastica, in consonanza con l’orientamento metanarrativo sviluppato nel romanzo. Lungo la narrazione, infatti, si incontrano diverse considerazioni sull’importanza della nominatio. Calvino pare dirci che tutto ruota attorno al nome proprio perché è attraverso di esso che si viene riconosciuti. È quindi facile concludere che le indagini onomastiche possono indicare un’altra modalità per addentrarsi in questo romanzo.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
L’obiettivo del mio intervento è quello di presentare il particolare caso di L’Acacia di Claude Simon. Questo testo, infatti, presenta uno statuto problematico dovuto anche alla difficoltà di interpretare la natura del personaggio principale. L’Acacia fa parte dei testi della maturità di Claude Simon, è pubblicata nel 1989 e riprende in larghissima parte i temi e le convenzioni delle opere simoniane precedenti. Simon, infatti, fonda tutti i suoi testi su di un particolare mélange di elementi romanzeschi e vicende autobiografiche, che ricorrono da un’opera all’altra e che si mescolano tra loro su numerosi livelli. La presenza di numerosi elementi appartenenti alla storia personale o familiare dell’autore conferisce a questo romanzo un aspetto autobiografico, tuttavia parlare di un’autobiografia in terza persona appare paradossale poiché il genere autobiografico suppone una certa complementarietà tra il discorso scritto sulla pagina e un’identità assunta al di sotto di una designazione specifica di un io.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
De acuerdo con el diccionario virtual de la Real Academia Española, una de las acepciones de “manual” es la siguiente: “libro en que se compendia lo más sustancial de una materia” y, en efecto, Hermenéutica literaria… ofrece una mirada anorámica y, al mismo tiempo, exhaustiva sobre los estudios literarios desde un enfoque hermenéutico. Específicamente, se centra en la exégesis estructuralista de textos narrativos y poéticos de la tradición clásica y contemporánea. Asimismo, cabe indicar que si bien se mencionan e interpretan algunas obras francesas e inglesas, el material de trabajo por antonomasia corresponde a la literatura hispánica.