Ralph M. Faust

Sometimes local action makes a difference. Ralph M. Faust, principal of Oswego High School in Oswego, New York, was my uncle. Here's a dissertation chapter about him and his leadership in helping Jewish refugees in Oswego who had fled the Holocaust. The author is at pains to acknowledge Ralph Faust's work, while whittling away a little at what he calls the myth of Ralph Faust. I do think Ruddy may inadvertently suggest that Ralph Faust fostered the "myth" that Ruddy writes about; in fact, Ralph Faust was a very modest man who in interviews never tried to inflate his own role in these events.

http://www.oswego.edu/~ruddy/Buffalo%20Papers/Dissertation/Chapter%2004.pdf

Michael Berube on adjunct faculty

Michael Berube on adjunct faculty:

The New Faculty Majority (NFM) summit Reclaiming Academic Democracy: Facing the Consequences of Contingent Employment in Higher Education, held on Saturday, 28 January, at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC, was full of bitter ironies. The gathering was convened in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). But when Carol Geary Schneider, president of the AAC&U, asked in the opening plenary session who had availed themselves of the “crosswalk” she had established between the AAC&U and the NFM, it became distressingly clear that for most AAC&U members “in conjunction with” apparently meant little more than “in the same hotel as.” At one end of the long hallway, NFM members talked about the challenges of keeping body and soul intact while teaching 4-4 jobs to which they had been required to reapply every year for twenty years; at the other end, university administrators browsed a book exhibit whose keywords seemed to be finance, management, outcomes, and assessment. At one point in the NFM proceedings, a faculty member from Oakland Community College held up a handbook for deans she’d purchased at the other end of the hallway and noted that adjunct faculty merited only one mention, under the heading “budgets.” . . . (more)

from the MLA blog, Michael Berube, "Among the Majority," FROM THE PRESIDENT, MLA blog.

The Adjunct Project

Have a look at "The Adjunct Project," which is collecting U.S. data on the situation of adjunct faculty at colleges and universities. The core of the project at this point is an open GoogleDocs spreadsheet on which contingent faculty are asked to report pay and working conditions at their institutions.

"The Adjunct Project is a way for us to compile data on treatment of contingent faculty. Combining our knowledge and resources will help us all to better understand the reality of life as an adjunct professor. The goal of this website is to identify universities that set the standard for best practices with regard to adjuncts. The best schools should be recognized and honored for what they are doing. The project is also designed to promote transparency in higher education employment practices for the sake of teachers, students, and parents."

Visual Information

Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011).

See also the blog Visualcomplexity.com

Democracy and News

Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

"The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct 'media regimes' eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment."

The Road to Economic Feudalism?

" . . . Is it possible that in the United States and Europe, democratic free market capitalism is no longer capable of providing broadly shared benefits to a solid majority of workers? . . ."

Thomas B. Edsall, "Is This the End of Market Democracy?" New York Times, 20 February 2012.

Tourism and Imagination

Jonathan Skinner and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, Great Expectations: Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011)

table of contents, from the publisher:

Chapter 1. Introduction:The Play of Expectation in Tourism
Jonathan Skinner & Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

Chapter 2. Success and Access to Knowledge in the Tourist-local Encounter: Confrontations with the Unexpected in a Turkish Community
Hazel Tucker

Chapter 3. Emberá Indigenous Tourism and the World of Expectations
Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

Chapter 4. The Paradox of Gaze and Resistance in Native American Cultural Tourism: An Alaskan Case Study
Alexis Celeste Bunten

Chapter 5. Forward into the past: 'Digging' the Balearic Islands
Jacqueline Waldren

Chapter 6. On Difference, Desire, and the Aesthetics of the Unexpected: The White Masai in Kenyan Tourism
George Paul Meiu

Chapter 7. Displeasure on ‘Pleasure Island’: tourist expectation and desire on and off the Cuban dance floor
Jonathan Skinner

Chapter 8. The Coach Fellas: Tourism performance and expectation in Ireland
Kelli Ann Malone

Chapter 9. Going on Holiday to Imagine War: The Western Front Battlefields as Sites of Commemoration and Contestation
Jennifer Iles

Chapter 10. Touring the Dead: Imagination, Embodiment and Affect in Gunter Von Hagen’s Body Worlds Exhibitions
Jane Desmond

Chapter 11. Afterword: The Tour as Imagined, Lived, Experienced, and Told
Ed Bruner

Contraception’s Con Men by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

The bishops’ opposition to contraception is not an argument for a “conscience exemption.” It is a way of imposing Catholic requirements on non-Catholics. This is religious dictatorship, not religious freedom. . . .

Garry Wills, "Contraception's Con Men," New York Review of Books


Contraception’s Con Men by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Halftime in America

The Clint Eastwood Super Bowl ad.

Letters and Public Advocacy

Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy without Public Intellectuals (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).




from the publisher:

“The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the ‘minor rhetoric’ of the public letter. Samuel McCormick’s skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work.” —Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003)

Although the scarcity of public intellectuals among today’s academic professionals is certainly a cause for concern, it also serves as a challenge to explore alternative, more subtle forms of political intelligence. Letters to Power accepts this challenge, guiding readers through ancient, medieval, and modern traditions of learned advocacy in search of persuasive techniques, resistant practices, and ethical sensibilities for use in contemporary democratic public culture. At the center of this book are the political epistles of four renowned scholars: the Roman Stoic Seneca the Younger, the late-medieval feminist Christine de Pizan, the key Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, and the Christian anti-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Anticipating much of today’s online advocacy, their letter-writing helps would-be intellectuals understand the economy of personal and public address at work in contemporary relations of power, suggesting that the art of lettered protest, like letter-writing itself, involves appealing to diverse, and often strictly virtual, audiences. In this sense, Letters to Power is not only a nuanced historical study but also a book in search of a usable past.

Conversational Rhetoric

Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.


from the publisher:

Much of the scholarly exchange regarding the history of women in rhetoric has emphasized women’s rhetorical practices. In Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres—humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women’s preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks. She examines the relationship between communication and gender and between theory and pedagogy and argues that women constructed a theory of rhetoric based on conversation, not public speaking, as a model for all discourse.

Donawerth traces the development of women’s rhetorical theory through the voices of English and American women (and one much-translated French woman) over three centuries. She demonstrates how they cultivated theories of rhetoric centered on conversation that faded once women began writing composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences in the latter part of the nineteenth century. She recovers and elucidates the importance of the theories in dialogues and defenses of women’s education by Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, and Madeleine de Scudéry; in conduct books by Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and Eliza Farrar; in defenses of women’s preaching by Ellen Stewart, Lucretia Mott, Catherine Booth, and Frances Willard; and in elocution handbooks by Anna Morgan, Hallie Quinn Brown, Genevieve Stebbins, and Emily Bishop. In each genre, Donawerth explores facets of women’s rhetorical theory, such as the recognition of the gendered nature of communication in conduct books, the incorporation of the language of women’s rights in the defenses of women’s preaching, and the adaptation of sentimental culture to the cultivation of women’s bodies as tools of communication in elocution books.

Rather than a linear history, Conversational Rhetoric follows the starts, stops, and starting over in women’s rhetorical theory. It covers a broad range of women’s rhetorical theory in the Anglo-American world and places them in their social, rhetorical, and gendered historical contexts. This study adds women’s rhetorical theory to the rhetorical tradition, advances our understanding of women’s theories and their use of rhetoric, and offers a paradigm for analyzing the differences between men’s and women’s rhetoric from 1600 to 1900.

Why College?

What is college for?

"Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding. Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting. It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have. Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting. . . ."

Gary Gutting, "What Is College For?" New York Times, 15 December 2011.

Cold War Rhetoric

Ned O'Gorman, Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting World Views in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

In spring of 1953, newly elected President Eisenhower sat down with his staff to discuss the state of American strategy in the cold war. America, he insisted, needed a new approach to an urgent situation. From this meeting emerged Eisenhower's teams of "bright young fellows," charged with developing competing policies, each of which would come to shape global politics. In Spirits of the Cold War, Ned O’Gorman argues that the early Cold War was a crucible not only for contesting political strategies, but also for competing conceptions of America and its place in the world. Drawing on extensive archival research and wide reading in intellectual and rhetorical histories, this comprehensive account shows cold warriors debating "worldviews" in addition to more strictly instrumental tactical aims. Spirits of the Cold War is a rigorous scholarly account of the strategic debate of the early Cold War — a cultural diagnostic of American security discourse and an examination of its origins.

Rhetorical Education in Antiquity

Jeffrey Walker, The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

Genuine Teachers of This Art examines the technê, or "handbook," tradition—which it controversially suggests began with Isocrates—as the central tradition in ancient rhetoric and a potential model for contemporary rhetoric. From this innovative perspective, Jeffrey Walker offers reconsiderations of rhetorical theories and schoolroom practices from early to late antiquity as the true aim of the philosophical rhetoric of Isocrates and as the distinctive expression of what Cicero called "the genuine teachers of this art."

Through a study of the classical rhetorical paideia, or training system, Walker makes a case for considering rhetoric not as an Aristotelian critical-theoretical discipline, but as an Isocratean pedagogical discipline in which the art of rhetoric is neither an art of producing critical theory nor even an art of producing speeches and texts, but an art of producing speakers and writers. Walker grounds his study in pedagogical theses mined from revealing against-the-grain readings of Cicero, Isocrates, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Walker also locates supporting examples from a host of other sources, including Aelius Theon, Aphthonius, the Rhetoric to Alexander, the Rhetoric to Herennius, Quintilian, Hermogenes, Hermagoras, Lucian, Libanius, Apsines, the Anonymous Seguerianus, and fragments of ancient student writing preserved in papyri. Walker's epilogue considers the relevance of the ancient technê tradition for the modern discipline of rhetoric, arguing that rhetoric is defined foremost by its pedagogical enterprise, the project of producing rhetors capable of intelligent, effective, and useful civic engagement through speech and writing.

This groundbreaking vision of the technê tradition significantly revises the standard picture of the ancient history of rhetoric with ramifications for the contemporary disciplinary identity of rhetoric itself.

Peace Now

Political protest art focus of University Libraries exhibit

Friday, November 11, 2011

An exhibit featuring political protest art from the Thomas W. Benson Collection, will be on display from Nov. 18 to Feb. 1, 2012, in the Diversity Studies Room, 203 Pattee Library, Penn State University. The collection captures the intensely political climate and emerging student engagement with war, patriotism and anti-imperialism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibit is open during standard library hours. Call 814-865-3063 to confirm times.

Benson will give a gallery talk at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 29, in the Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library and also on MediaSite Live at www.libraries.psu.edu/mtss. No login required.

The Benson Political Protest Poster Collection began in August 1969, when Thomas W. Benson, then on the faculty of SUNY Buffalo, arrived as visiting professor to spend the year in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Political activity on campus was common though a fairly quiet presence, but the climate on the Berkeley campus changed dramatically in 1969 when the public learned of the 1968 My Lai Massacre, a murder of more than 350 innocent victims by U.S. troops. This massacre, combined with then Governor Ronald Reagan’s anti-University campaign and fiscal cuts, along with President Nixon’s April 1970 Cambodian invasion, fueled emotional demonstrations and strikes by faculty and students.

Benson noted, “The university became a sort of teach-in about the war.” Student design artists and activists banded together and created the Berkeley Political Poster Workshop that designed, printed, and distributed hundreds of political protest posters in support of the anti-war movement.

The Eberly Family Special Collections Library acquired the political protest posters in 2009 as a gift from Benson, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric, Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, and the editor of the series in Rhetoric and Communication for the University of South Carolina Press.

To view the full online Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Digital Collection, go to http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/benson.html online.

Library announcement is here.

Police Attack at UC Berkeley

Police at the University of California, Berkeley, attacked students with billy clubs as part of the response to the Occupy movement there. The video above is borrowed from You Tube and from a story about the attacks in the Huffington Post.

See also Robert Hass, "Poet-Bashing Police," New York Times, 19 November 2011.

The Future of Nonviolent Protest

from Bob Ostertag in the Huffington Post:

Yesterday, police at UC Davis attacked seated students with a chemical gas.

I teach at UC Davis and I personally know many of the students who were the victims of this brutal and unprovoked assault. They are top students. In fact, I can report that among the students I know, the higher a student's grade point average, the more likely it is that they are centrally involved in the protests.

This is not surprising, since what is at issue is the dismantling of public education in California. Just six years ago, tuition at the University of California was $5357. Tuition is currently $12,192. According to current proposals, it will be $22,068 by 2015-2016. We have discussed this in my classes, and about one third of my students report that their families would likely have to pull them out of school at the new tuition. It is not a happy moment when the students look around the room and see who it is that will disappear from campus. These are young people who, like college students everywhere and at all times, form some of the deepest friendships they will have in their lives. . . .

Bob Ostertag, "Militarization of Campus Police," Huffington Post, 19 November 2011.

photo: AP Photo/The Enterprise, Wayne Tilcock

Rhetoric in Society 4 Conference

Call for Papers

Rhetoric in Society 4

“Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship:

Purposes, Practices, and Perspectives”

Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication
Section of Rhetoric
University of Copenhagen
January 15-18, 2013

Greetings all,

This is the first bulletin of the fourth biennial Rhetoric in Society Conference to be held January 15-18, 2013 at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

With this bulletin, we want to invite you to do two things: mark your calendars and start thinking about how you might contribute to the conference with your scholarship.

Below, we introduce the theme of the conference and provide basic information about the various presentation formats.

Within a few weeks, we will contact you again with more information about the conference program, key-note speakers, and how to submit an abstract.

In the planning of the conference we wish to promote discussion among conference attendees. One way is to set time aside for discussion in all meetings, another is to allow for regular breaks, and a third way is to arrange social gatherings suitable to networking and amicable conversation. We hope you will come and be part of the discussion!

Theme

The theme for this fourth conference on Rhetoric in Society is “Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship: Purposes, Practices, and Perspectives”.

With the concept of rhetorical citizenship we want to draw critical attention to the ways in which being a citizen in a modern democratic state is in many respects a discursive phenomenon. Citizenship is not just a condition such as holding a passport, it is not just behavior such as voting; citizenship also has a communicative aspect: Some perform citizenship when they watch a political debate on TV or discuss a program about homeless people with their colleagues over lunch - or when, one day, they don’t duck behind the fence but engage their cranky neighbor in conversation about her views on city street lighting. Others enact citizenship when they engage in political debates on Facebook or Twitter or join their friends in coming up with the most poignant wording for a protest sign the day before a street demonstration. And for others still, “rhetorical citizenship” is a distant ideal far from the realities of their everyday life; because the legal citizenship, literacy, and media access that such a conception of citizenship often presupposes aren’t within their reach, their experience with rhetorical citizenship is one of exclusion.

Rhetoric, with its double character as academic discipline and practice, stands in a unique position to engage the linguistic and discursive aspects of collective civic engagement. Drawing on and in collaboration with neighboring fields of inquiry such as political science, discourse studies, linguistics, media studies, informal logic, practical philosophy and social anthropology, scholars of rhetoric are able to study actual communicative behavior as it circulates in various fora and spheres – from face to face encounters to mediated discourse. With our diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds we hold many keys to pressing concerns such as the alleged polarization and coarsening of the ‘tone’ in public debate, the turning away from political engagement toward smaller spheres of interest, and the general difficulty in making politics work constructively in many parts of the world, not least the EU.

We invite attendees – scholars, teachers, students, and citizens across a range of disciplinary traditions – to extend our knowledge of the social roles of rhetoric through theoretical and critical study, and to consider our roles as public intellectuals: how are we to name, describe, criticize, analyze, and, indeed, undertake or teach rhetorical action on matters of communal concern whether locally, nationally, or internationally?

We invite papers that help address questions such as, e.g.:

* How is rhetorical citizenship to be defined and developed as a critical frame for studying rhetoric in society?

* What conditions must obtain for rhetorical citizenship to be possible and thrive?

* What rhetorical processes and maneuvers can be observed in practitioners of rhetorical citizenship?

* How is rhetorical citizenship instantiated across genres, settings, and cultural or geographical settings?

* How is rhetorical citizenship experienced differently, even controversially, depending on power differentials and social or regional constraints?

* How can rhetorical history and pedagogy serve as a resource for contemporary theory, practice and critique of rhetorical citizenship?

* What disciplinary connections need to be made or reinvigorated for fruitful interdisciplinary work on rhetorical citizenship?

* What are potentials and pitfalls for sound and dynamic public rhetorical engagement?

* What is good and what is poor rhetorical citizenship?



Your contribution to the conference

Please consider submitting a panel, individual, poster and/or special session proposal that speaks to the conference theme.

In addition to the specified length requirements (see below), please include in an abstract: the title of the paper, name(s) of presenter(s), the nature of the material for analysis/the ‘case’, the guiding research question and/or overall argument as well as identification of the theoretical and/or methodological basis of the inquiry.

Panel proposals, individual proposals, and special format proposals will all be placed in sessions of 60 - 90 minutes. Generally, 30 minutes will be set aside for each presentation to be used in this manner: 15-20 minutes for the presentation and 5-10 minutes for questions and discussion with the audience. After each presentation a few minutes should be set aside to allow audience members to leave the room and go to a different session.



Submission options

1) Panel proposals

Panels should consist of 3-4 presentations and preferably a respondent. A panel will have a 90-minute slot of which 20-30 minutes should be set off for discussion. Proposals should include a 250 word abstract for each individual presentation. Proposals should be no more than 1250 words in total.

Panel organizers are strongly encouraged to invite a respondent to initiate and lead discussion after the presentations.

Individual proposals

Individual presentations will be given a slot of 30 minutes of which 5-10 minutes should be set off for discussion and time to allow audience members to change rooms. Proposals should include a 250 word abstract.

Individual papers will be grouped according to topic and/or theoretical approach by the conference planners. Once the program is ready, we encourage presenters on each session to exchange papers two weeks in advance of the conference in order to participate in a common discussion of the papers toward the end of the session.

3) Special format proposals

Special format sessions of 60-90 minutes are invited. Special format proposals are meant to encourage panels that are unusual in format, especially those that invite the active participating of both presenters and audiences. Consider such formats as debates, a series of short position papers designed to generate discussion, roundtables, screenings of rhetorical performances followed by discussion, workshops or other special formats. In addition to explaining the nature of the special format, the technical requirements needed to carry it through, and the estimated time need, proposals for such sessions should adhere to the formal requirements of ‘regular’ panels, i.e., analytical focus, theory, and explain the role of the participants, and the goals and aims of the session. The word limit is 350 words.

Poster proposals

A poster is a visual artefact of ‘poster’ size that represents a scholarly project on the conference theme in a visual/graphic manner. Posters will be exhibited in designated areas throughout the conference area, and there will be time set aside for conference participants to study the posters and discuss them with the presenters in an informal manner. Posters may present work not otherwise presented at the conference.

Submit your proposal

Proposals should be submitted to the conference website by March 1, 2012. We will notify you when we are ready to accept submissions.

In upcoming bulletins we will provide information about when and how to submit proposals.


Conference website

The conference website for RiS4 2013 is still under construction but can be found at this URL: <http://rhetoricinsociety.hum.ku.dk>rhetoricinsociety.hum.ku.dk

Why not bookmark the website today, so that you can easily return and stay abreast as it develops and provides information on how to submit proposals, how to register for the conference, where to stay, etc.?


academic committee

Hilde van Belle, Lessius University, Antwerp, Belgium

Robert Ivie, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA/Honorary Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Jens Kjeldsen, University of Bergen, Norway/Södertörn University, Sweden (RSE)

Marie Lund Klujeff, Aarhus University, Denmark (RSE)

Kendall Phillips, Syracuse University, USA (RSA)



Organizing committee

Mette Bengtsson, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Mark Herron, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Christian Kock, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Rasmus Rønlev, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Lisa S. Villadsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Can the Government Create Jobs?

Paul Krugman in the Times, on the rhetoric of job creation:

A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.” . . .

Paul Krugman, "Bombs, Bridges, and Jobs," New York Times, 31 October 2011.

Apple Picking

Picking apples. Camden County, New Jersey.

Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985, photographer. October 1938.

FSA-OWI collection, Library of Congress.

fsa 8b17177 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8b17177

In our course in American Rhetoric in the New Deal Era, 1932-1945, we have recently read John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, which describes a strike in California apple orchards in the period.