Our violent times call forth rhetorical intensities. In this issue, authors bring their rhetorical expertise to bear at the limits of human thriving. Across a range of spaces—from the classroom to the virtual world of social media and into the prison—rhetorical analytics enable scholars to explore ways people caught up in violent circumstances support each other as students and teachers, keep memories alive, confront difference without violence, and cultivate hope for better futures.
Kendall Gerdes opens the issue with “Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity,” a clear-eyed confrontation with what she shows to be a fabricated crisis concerning trigger warnings in university settings. Gerdes then moves on to defend the practice of preparing students to encounter troubling content, grounding her argument in a rhetorical and pedagogical theory that recuperates “sensitivity” as an essential element of human relations. Joe Edward Hatfield follows, delving into the deeply troubling phenomenon of transgender suicide. Letters from two young suicide victims posted to Tumblr after their deaths and the viral responses to them become material for Hatfield’s articulation of a new genre and for a case study of an ecological phenomenon, the queer kairotic: a fresh take on an ancient rhetorical concept.
Social crises aired in popular memoirs lead Katherine Mack and Jonathan Alexander to propose a rhetorical approach to this newly important genre. Taking as their examples two widely read and controversial works—Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Coates’s Between the World and Me—Mack and Alexander reinterpret the subject of memoir in terms of rhetorical ethos. Tracking the uptake of memoirs in public discourse and common reading sites enables Mack and Alexander to evaluate the social and political responsiveness of writers who offer their personal stories as representative. Next David Coogan makes a powerful case for sophistic pedagogy in prisons. Drawing on his years of experience teaching incarcerated people, various approaches to prison education, and current literature on the prison-industrial complex, Coogan makes creative and convincing links with the paideia and practices of ancient Greek rhetors for help in constructing a humane and future-oriented educational project.
Finally, in another turn back to the Greeks, James Kastely invites us to consider again one of that tradition’s most important texts, Plato’s Phaedrus. The opportunity arises from his reading of Intimacies, a dialogue between two scholars of psychoanalytic theory and sexuality, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips. Their use of the Phaedrus to support an argument for eros and sameness as a path to intimacy leads Kastely to counter with a rhetorical reevaluation of the dialogue, through which he finds a necessary engagement with difference and the means for confronting intolerance.
This serious work responds to some of our most desperate problems today. It confirms for me the centrality of our art in the difficult process of finding ways forward and the commitment of rhetoric scholars to that project.