Modernismo or Transatlantic Romanticism: José Martí and William Wordsworth

In this essay, I argue that Spanish American modernismo (1880-1917) constitutes an affirmation and negation of Romanticism: it is a manifestation of Romanticism’s critical reason and self-definition as literature in the Spanish American sphere, and it is a denial of Romanticism as a European cultural period and as a metropolitan literary model. To explore this contradiction, I contrast the allegories of literature in William Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1802) and José Martí’s “Prólogo al Poema del Niágara de Juan A. Pérez Bonalde” (1882). Both texts have been considered as pivotal literary manifestos of Romanticism and modernismo, respectively. Through this essay, its theoretical background, and rhetorical reading, I rethink the transatlantic relationship between both cultural movements and their self-definitions as literature.

Intermediaries and Personas: A radical rhetorical reading of marketing work

This article examines the various ways in which marketing work (in both 'practice' and scholarship) engages with the construction of personas. It positions marketing as a rhetorical enterprise concerned with the establishment of intermediary and liminal positions within society; positions which are designed, as in Jung's description of the persona, to "make a definite impression upon others [...and...] to conceal the true nature of the individual" (Jung 1972, p. 192) in order to facilitate social integration. An initial close reading of Jung's work on the persona provides the context for a portrayal of the extreme tensions between organisational/disciplinary/professional identity and persona in modern marketing work. The article examines the long history of anxiety that marketers have manifested regarding the reputation of their practice, the 'morality' and 'scientific' ethos of their unavoidably relativistic approach to truth and identity, and their focus on the construction of appearance/persona for commercial or political advantage. Finally, if the urge to create personas comes from needing to consistently portray the roles that society expects us to adopt (whether that be parson, cobbler or poet, to use Jung's examples), what happens to a discipline and profession which is so focused on the dynamic re-creation, re-assignment and re-invention of personas? The work argues that the distrust that marketing experiences at the hands of mainstream society illustrates the way in which the maintenance of a consistent persona, 'standing at one's post' (to use Jung's terminology), remains one of the most uncomfortable and contested aspects of modern life.

The Critic and the Mime

In this interview, J. Hillis Miller and Nidesh Lawtoo take one of the most influential concepts in Western aesthetics, mimēsis, as an Ariadne’s thread to retrace the major turns in Miller’s career and, by extension, to promote a re-turn of mimesis in literary theory and criticism. Complicating standard accounts of deconstruction and rhetorical reading as simply antimimetic, Miller acknowledges the centrality of this ancient concept to his intellectual development and to major turns in literary theory as well: his early engagement with New Criticism and phenomenology in the 1950s, his encounter with Jacques Derrida and deconstruction in the 1960s, his development of rhetorical reading in the company of Paul de Man in the 1970s and 1980s, and his engagement with ethics and community in 1990s and 2000s, stretching to include his most recent critical reflections on contemporary US politics and the new media that disseminate it. In the process, this interview reveals how mimēsis functions as a protean concept, or mime, that under different conceptual masks is constantly at play in Miller’s dialogic relation with criticism and theory, old and new. Staging a dialogue, Miller and Lawtoo join forces to show that this often marginalized literary-philosophical concept takes center stage in the political, ethical, scientific, and technological transformations that cast a shadow on present and future generations.

Impasse? What Impasse?

Theories of historical and political change often rely on the idea of a breaking point at which radical action becomes a necessity. Theories of impasse—whether historical, political, or linguistic in focus—respond more or less directly to the assumptions behind this idea. This essay queries these assumptions. Opening with a discussion of how the concept of “the intolerable” features in the work of radical thinkers, the first section examines Lauren Berlant’s project in Cruel Optimism and explores her notion of “the impasse of the present.” The second section then turns to the work of Paul de Man, who, from Allegories of Reading on, develops a complementary theory of the impasse of the present that grows out of his theory of rhetorical reading. Although Berlant and de Man are each preoccupied in different ways with the idea of impasse, both ultimately demonstrate that impasse is best understood as an impossibility. Through readings of KC Green’s webcomics “On Fire” (best known as the source text of the “This is Fine” meme) and “This is Not Fine,” the essay illustrates and considers the broader implications of this impossibility.

“She dances featly”: Dance as Rhetoric in Act 4, Scene 4 of The Winter's Tale

In The Muses' Concord, James H. Jensen observes that rhetorical theory and practice ground all the arts of the Renaissance era (47). This connection is evident in the discourse of rhetorical and dance performance shared between Classical rhetoric treatises and Renaissance dance manuals, which leads one to understand both arts equally as forms of ordered and measured language. The recognition and perspectives of dance as a form of rhetoric contribute much to our understanding of the culture's awareness and economy of nonverbal communication. The shared elements of rhetoric and dance can be observed in the sheep-shearing festival scene of The Winter's Tale (4.4). A rhetorical reading of this scene conveys the rhetorical quality of dance, as well as its dramaturgical function. Framing this reading is a cultural and historical context that delineates the association between dance and rhetoric as it was understood by Quintilian, Sir Thomas Elyot, and Ben Jonson. Indeed, Perdita's corporeal eloquence communicates an air of nobility out of place in the rustic setting of this scene and misplaced within this assumed peasant. Because Perdita's true identity is discovered soon after (5.2), this scene, with its covert comingling of peasants and aristocrats and its graceful spectacle, can be understood as a pivotal moment that moves the play from its discordant beginning to its harmonious end.

The Disputes between Appion and Clement in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies: A Narrative and Rhetorical Approach to the Structure of Hom. 6

First and foremost, this contribution offers (1) a structural and rhetorical reading of the debates on the third day between Clement and Appion in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies (Hom. 6) and shows that there is a well-considered rhetorical ring structure in their disputes. Connected with this first point (2), the suggested reading will unravel how Clement and Appion use and manipulate their sophisticated rhetoric, linked to this particular structure. This is well worth considering since these debates deal with Greek paideia, which means culture and above all education, of which rhetorical education forms part. The rhetorical features will be displayed as a fine product of the rhetorical and even sophistic background in Late Antiquity. Clement, moreover, will present himself as a master in rhetoric against Appion, who is presented as a sophist and grammarian in the novel. Finally (3), the focus on the narrative structure of and the rhetorical dynamics in Hom. 6. will contribute to a better understanding of these disputes between Appion and Clement (Hom. 4-6) and their function in the novel generally.

Travelling with Ghosts in “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval’”

This essay develops a rhetorical reading of “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval,’” whose reflection on the relation between travel and the spectral is structured by aposiopesis, the figure of interruption or stopping in mid-utterance. The ultimate aposiopesis is death, and aposiopesis in its tropological and eschatological implications is both the subject of James’s essay and its central rhetorical procedure. James’s rereading of Denis Duval is informed by the interintrication of travel with the ghostly, memory, and literary tropology itself.

Reden über Rhetorik

It is safe to claim that characters and tropes do not 'actually' exist and that they are only 'invented' in the reading of a text, shaped by the gaze of the reader. The rhetorical analysis of the text is therefore tantamount to a self-analysis of the reader. For in talking about rhetoric, a reflection on reading as such also emerges unawares. Reading selects, expands, shifts, and replaces the meanings of the texts; it distorts the meaning it presupposes. Reading proceeds according to laws similar to those described by classical rhetoric for the production of a speech. Therefore, a more sustained talk about rhetoric, along selected texts, will eventually lead to a stylistics of reading. The book is therefore both a textbook on rhetoric and an introduction to the method of rhetorical reading. Using numerous literary examples, rhetorical tropes and figures as well as the history and systematics of rhetoric are presented in a clear and entertaining manner.

A Distant View of Close Reading: On Irony and Terrorism around 1977

In his article “A Distant View of Close Reading: On Irony and Terrorism around 1977,” György Fogarasi investigates the contemporary critical potentials of close reading in the light of recent developments in computation assisted analysis. While rhetorical reading has come to appear outdated in a “digital” era equipped with widgets for massive archival analysis (an era, namely, more keen on “distant,” rather than “close,” reading), Paul de Man’s insights concerning irony might prove useful in trying to account for the difficulties we must face in a world increasingly permeated with dissimulative forms of threat and violence. The article draws on three major texts from 1977: de Man’s draft on “Literature Z,” his lecture on “The Concept of Irony,” and the first and second Geneva Protocols. The reading of these texts purports to demonstrate the relevance of de Man’s theory of irony with respect to the epistemology of “terrorism,” but it also serves as an occasion to reflect upon questions of distance, speed, range, scale, or frequency, and the chances of “rhythmanalysis.”