Rhetoric Society Quarterly | 2023 | (PDF)

commons | digital community archiving | Memorial | precarity | Soviet state terror

Using the example of Memorial, Russia’s oldest nongovernmental organization, this essay develops the concept of “precarious commons” to describe the continuous and uncertain process of creating an open-access digital resource and maintaining a community around it. In 2022, Memorial became one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long efforts to open official archives, to collect and solicit testimony from survivors and families of victims of Soviet terror, and to promote democratic values and human rights in public life. These activities illustrate precarious cultural commoning: ever threatened by bureaucratic enclosure, political and cultural amnesia, and outright persecution. The organization’s extragovernmental, mostly volunteer-driven work has established an open digital archive of state repressions as well as a vital space for educating a new generation of memory activists and imagining a different collective future.

Memory Connection | 2019 | (PDF)

museums | epideictic rhetoric | popular memories | the Great Patriotic War | V Day | Russia | Stalin

This article examines contemporary museum practices in post-Communist Russia by focusing on a special exhibit, The City of Victors (Gorod Pobeditelei ), dedicated by the Museum of Moscow to the 70th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. The exhibit draws on ‘popular memories’—intimate artefacts and documents donated to the museum by ordinary Muscovites—to tell the story of patriotism and perseverance in wartime Moscow. However, this curatorial and exhibition strategy supports the revival of the Soviet-era myth of the Great Patriotic War and contributes to the recovery of Stalin as a model national leader. The exhibition’s rhetoric of participation is thus leveraged to authenticate a triumphalist narrative of the war in the service of an authoritarian regime.

Memory Studies | 2017 | (PDF)

accidental tourist | Iraq War | public memory | temporary memorials

How a memorial impacts public memory depends not just on its symbolic appeals but also on how it gains the attention of visitors and how those appeals convert visitors into engaged participants. Although numerous studies have explored visitors’ performances at sites of memory, this scholarship has largely overlooked what we call “the accidental tourist,” the would-be visitor who had not planned to visit a site of memory but ended up doing so because of the site’s proximity to another existing attraction or daily route. Building on research into the performances of memory at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, we expand inquiry into the way memorials attract and engage visitors by studying two temporary memorials to the cost of the Iraq War. We demonstrate how these memorials gain attention and prompt the engagement of “accidental tourists” through temporal and spatial tactics as well as both overt and subtle cues for visitors to interact with the site, organizers, and other visitors.

Advances in the History of Rhetoric | 2015 | (PDF)

In spring 2012 the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot became world famous when five of its members were arrested for their “Punk Prayer for Freedom” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow. Western media swiftly embraced the group and celebrated it as an icon of youthful female rebellion against Putin’s authoritarian regime. Yet the Western reception largely obscured the “regional accent” of the group’s protest rhetoric. This article seeks to restore this regional accent by foregrounding the rhetorical significance of place in Pussy Riot’s acts of protest.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly | 2010 | (PDF)

Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtin's apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtin's distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtin's account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtin's descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.

History and Memory | 2009 | (PDF)

Reprinted as “Russia’s Postcommunist Past” in Global Memoryscapes

National monuments typically serve as aesthetic manifestations of dominant visions of history and collective identity, but they can also generate a contestation of the past they are intended to cement. Defending this two-pronged interpretive approach, this essay attends to the changing symbolic power of a unique national monument—the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. The study traces the cathedral's historic role in Russia's national self-definition during the last two centuries. The cathedral's construction under tsars, destruction under Stalin, and the postcommunist rebuilding accompanied and justified a particular version of national identity. The role of the cathedral as a magnet for competing versions of Russia's traumatic past is illustrated by the controversy over its rebuilding after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly | 2007 | (PDF)

Reprinted in 50 Years of Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Selected Readings, 1968-2018

In sizing up the notion of public memory, rhetoricians would be remiss not to consider the increasing influence of new media on today's remembrance culture. This article addresses memorial functions of the internet in light of recent scholarly debates about virtues and drawbacks of modern "archival memory" as well as the paradoxical link between the contemporary public obsession with memory and the acceleration of amnesia. To explore the strengths and limitations of the internet as a vehicle of collecting, preserving, and displaying traces of the past, the article examines The September 11 Digital Archive, a comprehensive online effort to document public involvement in recording and commemorating the tragedy of 11 September, 2001.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly | 2006 | (PDF)

This essay examines several disciplinary and pedagogical assumptions behind Aristotle's centrality in the classical rhetorical canon and calls for a reconsideration of the established hierarchical relation of Aristotle to Isocrates.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly | 2005 | (PDF)

The rivalry between Plato and Isocrates has begun to receive scholarly attention, primarily because both Plato and Isocrates used the term philosophia to describe their occupation. However, the efforts to distinguish their respective uses and definitions of the term typically ignore the performative dimension of both Plato's and Isocrates' writings and their relationship with other discourses of Athenian public culture. This essay argues that both Plato and Isocrates constructed the domain of philosophy by performing the speech genres constitutive of Greek cultural memory. To support this claim, I offer a reading of Plato's Menexenus and Isocrates' Panegyricus, both of which were crafted in response to the same historical event, the Peace of Antalkidas. The essay demonstrates the distinct ways in which Plato and Isocrates appropriated generic conventions of the Athenian funeral oration and panegyric in order to construct the identity of a "philosopher" vis-à-vis his polis and to model the relationship between students of "philosophy" and discourses of their culture.

Philosophy and Rhetoric | 2004 | (PDF)

Space and Culture | 2003 | (PDF)

This article explores three loci of commemoration of 9/11 in New York City: the street memorial exemplified by makeshift shrines, posters of the missing, and graffiti; the museum installations that reflected on these street memorials and on the media's role in our collective experience of 9/11 and its aftermath; and the contested site of the permanent memorial at Ground Zero. The authors argue that both street memorials and museum exhibitions exemplify a tension between utopian and critical relations between the art and its public and that a balance between utopia and critique is perhaps the greatest challenge for the yet-unfinished memorial project in downtown Manhattan. The authors' goal is not so much to propose an ideal design for the memorial as to reflect on the aesthetic and political function of commemoration within the context of debates over public art and public space in the United States.

Quarterly Journal of Speech | 2003 | (PDF)

Reprinted in Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture

collective memory | postmodernity | postal stamps | iconography | consumer democracy

This essay offers a reading of one of the largest public commemorative projects in recent U.S. history, the Celebrate the Century stamp program, in order to explore the ambivalent potential of collective memory in postmodernity. Celebrate the Century exhibits the tension between aesthetic and political heterogeneity, on the one hand, and the tendency toward commodification and political amnesia, on the other. The essay develops by considering the evolution of commemorative postal iconography and its relation to postmodern simulacra, the process of selection of stamp subjects for Celebrate the Century, and the array of display strategies that helped to frame the collection as a commodity, the public as tourists, and history as progress toward consumer democracy.

Quarterly Journal of Speech | 2001 | (PDF)

Aristotle | endoxa | identity | Isocrates | literacy | orality | performance

The essay argues for a reconsideration of the role of the "literate revolution" in the disciplining of rhetorical practice in the fourth century BCE. Specifically, the argument addresses the tension between oral memory and literate rationality in Isocrates and Aristotle to illustrate two divergent possibilities of appropriating oral linguistic resources of a culture. Aristotle's literate classification of endoxa (received opinions) and pisteis (proofs) depoliticizes the oral utterances and maxims of contemporary Greek culture, thereby rendering discourse a mere accessory of a political agent. By contrast, Isocrates conceives of rhetorical performance as constitutive of political agency and civic identity.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly | 2000 | (PDF)

Recipient of the Charles Kneupper Award for Best Article

This essay argues that the genealogy of the schism between poetics and rhetoric can be understood best by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle towards the social impact of the poetic tradition with those of Isocrates. Plato seeks to discipline the process of poetic and political enculturation by splitting mimesis as representation from mimesis as performative imitation and audience identification. Aristotle completes Plato's utopian project by constructing a hierarchy wherein representational mimesis of the tragic plot in the Poetics is central to a philosophical life, while mimesis as performative imitation of style in the Rhetoric is of marginal utility. In so doing, he counters Isocrates' performative conception of speech education, according to which identification and performance both activate and sustain one's civic identity.

International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy | 2016 | (PDF)

A prominent ancient Greek intellectual, Aristotle not only contributed to multiple fields of philosophical inquiry but also established a systematic conceptual framework for thinking and talking about natural and social phenomena. In particular, his teachings on logic, dialectic, and rhetoric have become integral to Western intellectual tradition and they continue to stimulate contemporary debates about the role of language and persuasion in scientific inquiry and social cooperation.

International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy | 2016 | (PDF)

Plato is considered one of the greatest ancient Greek philosophers. In fact, he is responsible for inventing the language of philosophy as a discursive practice at a time when the meaning of “philosophy” was still in flux. Plato never defined philosophy directly and unambiguously; instead, he wrote dramatic dialogues that featured his intellectual hero, Socrates, as the main character. Plato's dialogues were written over the span of half a century (399–347 bce). Debates continue about the development of Plato's thought and about differences between Socrates the character and Plato the author. Interpretation of Plato's dialogues is further complicated because of their dramatic nature and frequent use of humor and parody. Despite these reservations, it is safe to claim that Plato's dialogues critically engage discourses of his predecessors and contemporaries. Plato stages the conflict between philosophy and traditional arts of language in order to establish philosophical discourse as the only path to true knowledge and justice.

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication | 2016 | (PDF)

Philosophy and Rhetoric | 2013 | (PDF)

Quarterly Journal of Speech | 2009 | (PDF)

The International Encyclopedia of Communication | 2008 | (PDF)

The term “epideictic” derives from the Greek epideixis, translated as “showing forth” or “display.” According to Aristotle's classification of rhetorical genres in The art of rhetoric, epideictic discourse is concerned with topics of praise and blame, deals with the present, and is addressed to an audience of spectators, rather than judges (1358a–b). Epideictic relies on verbal amplification (auxesis) to portray desirable qualities of the object of praise and to depict the object of blame as base and dishonorable (1368a). Although The art of rhetoric identifies epideictic as a distinct form or genre of rhetoric, it also notes that epideictic elements can be used in the other two main genres of oratory, when, for example, a deliberative speaker portrays a particular course of action as more attractive than others and a judicial orator's defense employs amplification to depict the accused in a favorable way.

Classical Rhetorics and Rhetoricians | 2005 | (PDF)

American Communication Journal | 2003 | (PDF)