This volume represents current theory and research in rhetoric, across disciplines, and is of interest to scholars and students in rhetoric studies in speech communication, English, and related disciplines.

This edited collection offers a broad consideration of contemporary rhetorical scholarship, tied to political, ethical, and spiritual themes. Originating from the 2004 conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, the contents of this volume reflects the conference themes of rhetorical agendas in current theory and research. The volume starts off with transcripts of the talks presented by the conference's featured speakers. The essays that follow are organized around five key topics: history, theory, pedagogy, publics, and gender. These chapters address subjects ranging from religious identity to civil rights; from weapons of mass destruction to literacy testing and electronic texts, reflecting the wide array of areas under study across the rhetoric discipline. With contributions from well-known scholars as well as newcomers, the breadth and diversity of this collection make a significant contribution to rhetorical scholarship, and will stimulate additional work. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students in rhetoric studies in speech communication, English, and related disciplines.

The bully pulpit is one of the modern president's most powerful tools—and one of the most elusive to measure. Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda uses the war on drugs as a case study to explore whether and how a president's public statements affect the formation and carrying out of policy in the United States. When in June 1971 President Richard M. Nixon initiated the modern war on drugs, he did so with rhetorical flourish and force, setting in motion a federal policy that has been largely followed for more than three decades. Using qualitative and quantitative measurements, Andrew B. Whitford and Jeff Yates examine presidential proclamations about battling illicit drug use and their effect on the enforcement of anti-drug laws at the national, state, and local level. They analyze specific pronouncements and the social and political contexts in which they are made; examine the relationship between presidential leadership in the war on drugs and the policy agenda of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorneys; and assess how closely a president's drug policy is implemented in local jurisdictions. In evaluating the data, this sophisticated study of presidential leadership shows clearly that with careful consideration of issues and pronouncements a president can effectively harness the bully pulpit to drive policy.

Social media is changing the business of representation in the Senate. If you want to know what your senator is up to, you don't need a newspaper, just your phone. Some senators are social media minimalists while others are digitally long-winded, but each senator has the ability to insert themselves into our daily digital routines and frame their political brand for a public audience. Drawing on a unique dataset of almost 200,000 senator tweets, Tweeting is Leading offers a critical analysis of senators' communication on Twitter, the individual and constituent forces that shape it, and the agendas that result. The public priorities that senators communicate through social media--what Annelise Russell calls their rhetorical agenda--offer a necessary tool for understanding how senators link their carefully crafted public image with potential voters. The rhetorical agenda challenges what we know about representation, removing the institutional and political constraints on congressional communication and giving lawmakers a messaging platform where individual discretion is high, the relative costs are low, and someone is always watching. Tweeting is Leading emphasizes why representation on social media matters for understanding media norms and how lawmakers digitally build a political brand, showing empirically how senators self-constrain their communications to curate different styles of representation that match constituent expectations.

Throughout the years, biographers have depicted John Calvin in manifold ways. Serene Jones takes a fresh look at Calvin as she draws a compelling portrait of Calvin as artist, engaged in the classical art of rhetoric. According to Jones, this art was used knowingly and skillfully by Calvin to persuade and challenge his diverse audiences. Jones offers a rhetorical reading of the first three chapters of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. What emerges is a truly original interpretation of Calvin and his work.

The Book of Ecclesiastes, like many ancient and modern first-person discourses, generates ambivalent responses in its readers. The book's rhetorical strategy produces both acceptance of, and suspicion towards, the major positions argued by the author. 'Vain rhetoric' aptly describes the persuasive and dissuasive properties of the narrator's peculiar characterization. It also describes how the Book of Ecclesiates, with its abundant use of rhetorical questions, constant gapping techniques, and other strategies from the arsenal of ambiguity, is a stunning testimony to the power of the various strategies of indirection to communicate to the reader something of his or her own rhetorical liabilities and limitations, as well as those of the religious community in general.

"Rhetoric, broadly conceived as the art of making things matter, is both a practice and theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a "practical art." By practical art, they mean methods tested in practice, by trial and error, with a goal of offering something useful and teachable. This volume presents just such an account of rhetoric. The account here does not turn away from theory, but rather presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The approaches ventured in this volume are inspired by the capacious conception of rhetoric put forth by historian of rhetoric Jeffrey Walker, who is perhaps best known for stressing rhetoric's educational mission and its contributions to civic life. The Practice of Rhetoric is organized into three sections designed to spotlight, in turn, the importance of poetics, performance, and philosophy in rhetorical practice. The volume begins with poetics, stressing the world-making properties of that word, in contexts ranging from mouse-infested medieval fields to the threat of toxin-ridden streams in the mid-twentieth century. Susan C. Jarratt, for instance, probes the art of ekphrasis, or vivid description, and its capacity for rendering alternative futures. Michele Kennerly explores a little-studied linguistic predecessor to prose-logos psilos, or naked speech-exposing the early rumblings of a separation between poetic and rhetorical texts even as it historicizes the idea of clothed or ornamented speech. In an essay on the almost magical properties of writing, Debra Hawhee considers the curious practice of people writing letters to animals in order to banish or punish them, thereby casting the epistolary arts in a new light. Part 2 moves to performance. Vessela Valiavitcharska examines the intertwining of poetic rhythm and performance in Byzantine rhetorical education, and how such practices underlie the very foundations of oratory. Dale Martin Smith draws on the ancient stylistic theory of Dionysius of Halicarnassus along with the activist work of contemporary poets Amiri Baraka and Harmony Holiday to show how performance and persuasion unify rhetoric and poetics. Most treatments of philosophy and rhetoric begin within a philosophical framework, and remain there, focusing on old tools like stasis and disputation. Essays in part 3 break out of that mold by focusing on the utility and teachability of rhetorical principles in education. Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor update stasis, a classical framework that encourages aspiring rhetors to ask after the nature of things, their facts and their qualities, as a way of locating an argument's position. Mark Garrett Longaker probes the medieval practice of disputation in order to marshal a new argument about why, exactly, John Locke detested rhetoric, and the longstanding opposition between science and rhetoric as modes of proof that has lasting implications for the way argument works today. Ranging across centuries and contexts, the essays collected here demonstrate the continued need to attend carefully to the co-operation of descriptive language and normative reality, conceptual vocabulary and material practice, public speech and moral self-shaping. The volume promises to rekindle long-standing conversations about the public, world-making practice of rhetoric, thereby enlivening anew its civic mission"--