Inleiding. Karaktermoord is een tijdloos wapen

Introduction. Character assassination, a timeless weapon Character assassination is the deliberate destruction of an individual’s reputation or credibility. While the term itself is relatively new, the practices it describes can be found in virtually all cultures and historical epochs. Despite their great variety, character attacks share five common aspects or pillars: they involve an attacker, a target, a medium, an audience and they take place in a particular cultural, political and technological context. In recent times there has been a surge in scholarship on character assassination from a range of academic disciplines, including political science, rhetoric and communication studies. This thematic issue will explore the historical dimensions of character assassination and the challenges and opportunities that come with it. It will focus in particular on the role that various media – ranging from Roman histories and medieval chronicles to nineteenth-century cartoons – have played in shaping practices of character assassination throughout the ages.

From the Subliminal to the Ridiculing

In studies conducted by scholars of political science, rhetoric, and media studies, the vast majority of research on political ads focuses either on images or on verbal appeals made by candidates or on their behalf. Yet the highest voter recall is for ads that make an emotional connection with the viewer. Often music is the lynchpin of an emotional appeal, and philosophers such as Jenefer Robinson and Derek Matravers write of the centrality of emotion to the musical experience. Recent scholarship on the relationship between emotion and politics includes the work of Ted Brader on emotional appeals in campaign ads and Drew Westen on the role of emotion in political thinking. Focusing on four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and two compound emotions (patriotism and contempt), this chapter explores how music evokes these emotions in several case studies.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric was—or is, and the uncertainty here is to the point—an unstable but hegemonic assemblage of categories, practices, doctrines, and institutions that endured from classical antiquity through to modernity. Rhetoric underwent radical transformations over this period of nearly three thousand years, entering into complex relationships with its discursive and educational others, including literature, philosophy, theology, and science. Rhetoric has variously been the pragmatic art of verbal action; the teachable (and so saleable) skill of persuasive speaking; an elite training in literary forms and genres inherited from ancient Rome and Greece; a set of protocols governing textual production and reception; the antiquarian collection of ornate and artificial modes of phraseology; a transcendent spirit of linguistic articulation and creation; and a branch of instruction in professional communication. This article presents five scenes—sometimes more tightly focused, sometimes more diffuse—drawn from the long history of rhetoric: a moment of rhetoric’s inception, in Syracuse in 466 bce; of its Christianization, in Milan, 387; of linguistic productivity, in Cambridge, 1511; of rhetorical transcendence, in Basel in 1872; and of social composition, in Minneapolis, 1968. In each of these moments, rhetoric’s conceptual, discursive, and institutional relations with literature were transfigured. They were scenes in which rhetoric was retied, so to speak, into a series of new knots with literature and philosophy. Other scenes and other itineraries would no doubt generate different stories—other knottings of rhetoric and its others.

Drought, Hurricane, or Wildfire? Assessing the Trump Administration’s Anti-Science Disaster

We describe the Trump Administration as an “anti-science disaster” and approach study of the phenomenon as other disaster researchers might study the impacts of a drought, hurricane, or wildfire. An important, but rare, element of disaster research is identification of baseline data that allow scientific assessment of changes in social and natural systems. We describe three potential baselines for assessing the nature and impact of Trump’s anti-science rhetoric and (in)action on science, science policy, and politics.

Criticism as culture: Above the first History of Serbian Literature Pavel Josef Safarik

The first History of Serbian Literature (1865) was written from the PEN of P. J. Safarik (1796-1861), a foreigner, who lived and worked in Novi Sad and did not write in Serbian. The final form was given by Safarik's son-in-law, who made some changes. The first edition was printed in 1826. The monograph includes a review of 289 writers. In addition to Serbian, he also deals writers who have written in foreign languages. The book contain a list of printers, patrons, scribes, a Cyrillic print of Catholic Serbs and a Cyrillic print of Protestants. He deals with works in the field of language science, rhetoric and poetry, philosophy, history and geography, pedagogy and mathematics, science of nature and technology, medicine, law and politics, including works in the field of theology. It is, therefore, a project that, through its critique of literature, actually illuminates the history of the culture of the Serbian people. Methodologically History is realized as it is done by contemporary historians of literature. Safarik's critical method, is proof that literary criticism always has a social function, if it is scientifically based and objective.

Retailing science: genre hybridization in online science news stories

This study explores how marketing and science rhetoric have become entrenched in online science news stories. The schematic structures of a corpus of 270 news stories from three types of website (university websites, the websites of Futurity.org and MSNBC.com) have been analyzed and compared. An eight-move structure identified from the corpus suggests that the genre of news stories is a hybridization of promotional discourse for marketization and science discourse for explanation. Hybridization is first evident in university press releases, which are then spread by the mass media without significant changes. From the perspective of intertextual chains, the emerging discourse practices can be attributed to the power shifting of news production from journalists to science institutions and further from journalistic to scientific norms. In turn, the discourse practices accelerate the shift of power, which could ultimately lead to the loss of independent and critical science journalism.

Connecting the Cultural Dots

This chapter engages the history and structure of analogical figuration. It enables a theorized broadening of concerns from negation to construction, sin and death to life and light, and puts poetry and religion under the same canopy of creativity as science. Analogy, alternatively named proportion, is equally familiar to mathematicians, scientists, and poets. The theorized roots of analogy are Aristotelian—a subcategory of metaphor with a basis in mathematics. Early modern analogy has drawn the attention of contemporary scholars from many disciplines—historians of science, rhetoric, literature, philosophy, and religion—but often in isolation from one another. Instead, my argument emphasizes the bond among disciplines in their use of analogy for exploration, experiment, and discovery. It also addresses continuity and change between early modern and ancient uses of analogy and frames them with modern ones. Science and rhetoric are two of its major foci.