We begin the new year and a new volume with an eclectic group of essays, distinguished by their innovative scholarly methods. Where do we get inspiration for new work in rhetoric? The seven authors featured in this issue open our eyes to a few of the unexpected scenes and settings that spark rhetorical inquiry. How many times have your eyes glanced over the distinguished image of (Dame or Lady) Rhetorica in a journal or conference brochure without much thought about the provenance or semiotics of the image? In “Moving Rhetorica,” co-authors Michele Kennerly and Carly S. Woods look to historical images of “rhetoric,” and ask why, how, and to what effect they have been taken up. A feminist critique of Andrea Mantegna’s fifteenth-century Rhetorica and related images suggests that her earlier Greek counter part, Peitho, may be a more apt figure for our field at present. Brandon Katzir’s “Paths of Virtue: Legal Rhetorics in Judaism and Islam” also poses a question of gender in a highly original comparison of legal rhetorics of medieval Judaism and Islam. With so much work to do to build a body of scholarship on religious rhetorics other than Christian, rhetoric scholars will welcome Katzir’s close work with legal rhetorics of these two traditions. We are accustomed to the frustrating stand-offs in contemporary political arguments from the Middle East, arguments that of course require our best rhetorical energies. But the essential background Katzir offers on the legal cultures and gendered practices of Judaic and Islamic law is bound to inform contemporary debates.
Next Laura Michael Brown brings us into the twentieth-century US protest scene with a return to the famous Greensboro sit-ins. We all have the picture of heroic young men sitting at the Woolworth lunch counter firmly fixed in our visual memories of civil rights protest. But few are aware of the tactical silence of women students of Bennett College who played a crucial role in the planning of this historic protest. Brown argues that these women now require a hearing, and their reasons for silence demand rhetorical analysis. In our fourth essay, Peter Wayne Moe finds inspiration in a composition student’s response to an early twentieth-century Italian aphorism. In “Something about the Written Delivery of the Line,” Moe finds an unexpected alliance between written style and rhetorical delivery in a young student’s laughing response to a written sentence.
Under the category of Theories Old and New, we present Kyle Jensen and Krista Ratcliffe’s contribution, “Mythic Historiography: Refiguring Kenneth Burke’s Deceitful Woman Trope.” The occasion for this study was a lively exchange in an RSA Institute workshop on Burke, and the outcome is a stimulating return to the role of gender in the work of one of our field’s most venerable theorists. By working through one of Burke’s “anti-feminist blind spots,” the authors discover links between myth and identification that require nothing less than a reorganization of his modern theory of rhetoric.
With this issue, Rhetoric Society Quarterly offers a bit more. We are grateful to Taylor & Francis for responding to our request to increase the length of the journal. I am pleased to be able to publish more of the exciting and creative scholarship coming across the editor’s desk.