In this reconsideration of social knowledge, an attempt is made to resolve ambiguities related to the original project on social knowledge. Three regions of dispute fostered by the original essay are examined and explained: the definition of social knowledge, the issue of form, and the problems of normative impact. (JMF)

Explores concrete poetry through traditional prosodic analyses of representative poems and suggests an analytic framework for the oral interpreter's approach to concrete poetry. (MH)

Examines different narratives of Native American education. Discusses the narrative about the nature and consequences of rhetorical and cultural transformation. Argues that rhetoric generated by Native Americans who have experienced dominant educational efforts in the United States reveals a form of mimesis that serves as a potent strategy for…

Examines Susan Sontag's February 1982 Town Hall Address as a case study of strategies and constraints associated with contextual reconstruction (whereby rhetors address perceived conflicts between text and context). Traces the development of these concepts in Sontag's writings. Discusses the counter-intentional understanding of Sontag's speech by…

Uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia (the dialectal voices present in language) to describe the narrative discourse in Flannery O'Connor's novel "Wise Blood," and to explore the rhetorical effects of the novel and the values embodied in its language. (SR)

Discusses the inadequacy of current rhetorical criticism and theory for the evaluation of protestors and agitators. Explains why discourse by and about women should be integrated into rhetorical studies, reviewing 11 books which make key texts available or increase understanding of feminism as a historical social movement. (SR)

Advances a "rhetoricized" conception of alienation through the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, a British feminist writing in the 1790s. Suggests that alienation is a discursive problem posed by the interpolation of women throughout history and the reification of those interpolations over time. Shows how alienation functions as a critical…

Develops an approach to rhetorical criticism by integrating the work of Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson with that of the depth psychologist C. G. Jung. Reconceptualizes the cultural psyche as composed of historical and universal elements, redefines the rhetorical and moral functions of narrative texts, and casts the rhetorical critic as…

Discusses the methodological issues of the role of "critique" and the role of an author's announced or apparent political commitments in ethnography. Compares and contrasts the views of John Fiske and Donal Carbaugh (whose articles appear in the same issue of this journal) on these issues. (PRA)

Suggests that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address is an example of a speech using metaphor to transcend a recurring rhetorical problem. Shows how Roosevelt merged two metaphoric clusters, religious and military, into the image of "Holy War," first to calm, then activate the American people. (SR)

Analyzes the way a specific narrative text (Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 feature film "The Big Chill") confronts the relationship between communal norms and political possibilities. Shows how the film enacts a complex disjunctive narrative argument endorsing a specific form of communal affiliation (what Hannah Arendt refers to as…

Considers how rhetorical scholars have theorized the potential of protest rhetoric to transform social and symbolic realities. Uses complicity theory to examine Louis Farrakhan's rhetoric, providing a theoretical amplification of "symbolic realignment," a critical examination of his epistemological commitments, and a practical…

This essay stages a theoretically driven critique of Lawrence Kasdan's film "The Big Chill" as a productive example of a constitutive contradiction animating the liberal political imaginary. In particular, it argues that liberalism relies irreducibly on an under-examined conception of friendship to supply its model of citizenship as a distinctive,…

Joshua Gunn calls for the creation of a new post-humanist, -Marxist, -Freudian approach to rhetorical criticism that would combine literary, critical, and psychoanalytic methods in a new "popular imaginary" paradigm. While urging acceptance of his new paradigm, Gunn advances three major criticisms of symbolic convergence theory (SCT): (1) SCT is…

Research by Martin Joos and John J. Gumperz to develop a perspective for rhetorical analysis. Carter's final remarks in his Playboy interview are shown to reflect an ineffective sociolinguistic code shift to a stylistic level inappropriate to Carter as public personality and as presidential candidate. (JF)