Studies in Rhetoric/Communication – serie

Focusing on the works of lesser-known yet influential Deists, the author examines the 70-year polemic between the Church of England and the English Deists, illuminating the rhetorical war which raged between them. He contends that Deism owes its significance to these skilled controversialists.

The 18 essays in this volume seek to retrieve the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. Beginning by tracing the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories, the articles then examine exceptional women rhetoricians, their practices and strategies, throughout history.

Explores how five turn-of-the-century women - Frances Willard, Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman and Mary Church Terrell - crafted autobiographies that became persuasive models for the women of their generation, and lead to movements for social change.

Of the ancient Greek Sophists, Gorgias of Leontini (c.483-376BCE) has endured more than his share of insistent detractors. Aristophanes depicted him as a barbaric sycophant, Plato considered him an opportunistic charlatan indifferent to truth and morality, and Aristotle saw him as a gaudy but inept stylist. Scott Consigny joins the commentators who find merit in Gorgias' thought, but his perceptions of Gorgias differ from those of the two most influential efforts at rehabilitation. He maintains that both the ""subjectivist"" reading by Hegel and the ""empiricist"" reading by George Grote - and among the rhetoricians of today by Richard Enos and Edward Schiappa - grant too much to Plato and Aristotle at the same time that, like most current interpretations of Gorgias, they fail to take into account all the extant remarks by the Sophist. By viewing Gorgias as in more radical disagreement with Plato and Aristotle than the other rehabilitators do, Consigny brings order to the Sophist's elusive, enigmatic ideas and peculiar style and stations him as a seminal philosopher and skilled artist, a formidable rival to Plato and Parmenides. On Consigny's reading, Gorgias is an antifoundationalist who repudiates the idea that knowledge and truth must be grounded in objective standards or in subjective certainty but instead views truth as a category that a community employs to endorse what it finds persuasive. Consigny's reading is one development of Stanley Fish's assertion that ""modern antifoundationalism is old Sophism writ analytic"", and he pursues his insight into Gorgias' moral and political philosophy, where he sees antifoundationalism manifesting itself in a conventionalist ethic and the advocacy of a peaceful competition among different societies.

An analysis of how public arguments centered on ""the people"" contribute to the complex process of nation building; At a time when national identity is a potent political force, Strategies of Remembrance sheds light on the relationships between economic, civic, cultural, and ethnic forms of nationalism, and on the interactions of nationalism in those forms with the politics of memory and the thetoric of democracy. Despite the broadly acknowledged fact that national identities are negotiated through discourse, concrete studies of the process are rare. By focusing on rejected public addresses, critically investigating reactions to those speeches, and examining what he calls ""narrative omissions"" - what politicians are constrained from saying in an official capacity - M. Lane Bruner elucidates the complex relationships between public speech and community building. Strategies of Remembrance visits Europe in the waning years of the Cold War, as manipulations of national identity functioned both to erase the painful memories of National Socialism and to promote West Germany's role as the vanguard of democratic capitalism - while Germans were characterized as the victims of the Second World War. Bruner looks at Russia prior to the adoption of a new constitution in 1993, when appeals to national identity functioned primarily to corruptly facilitate the transition from a centralized to a market economy while the Soviets and democracy were characterized as incompatible, Last, he turns to Quebec's attempt in 1995 to secede from Canada and explains how, after a narrow defeat, secessionist supporters shifted from ethnic and cultural to civic nationalism in a Quebec where historically secession had been justified to protect French Canadian culture. Together, Bruner's studies suggest the important role the fashioning of national identities will continue to play in the twenty-first century and the need for ongoing critiques of the rhetorical means employed.

Significantly deepening our understanding of two key figures from the modernist period, The Humane Particulars collects the letters between William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke. Written during forty-two years of close friendship and literary debate, these nearly 250 letters span two long lives, two complicated personalities, and two brilliantly productive careers. The animated exchange between a canonical poet and the leading American rhetorical critic of the twentieth century offers a more complete vision of their outlooks and their contributions to the shape and tenor of the modernist scene. Set in context by James H. East's introduction and explanatory notes, the letters begin just after Burke and Williams's initial meeting in 1921 during a tramp through a New Jersey swamp and surrounding meadowlands. Their written exchange follows the maturing of their friendship and professional regard. The correspondence shows that Williams and Burke were fast friends during the experimental twenties, preoccupied by individual and divergent projects in the thirties and early forties, and reunited as enthusiastic correspondents after the Second World War. The letters refer to happy times spent together - walks in the woods, picnics and swimming, and visits to Burke's farm in Andover, New Jersey. They reveal, among other interesting personal matters, Burke's fascination with Williams's double life as physician and poet, Burke's hypochondria, and Williams's at times chastising medical advice to Burke. But, more important, the letters preserve the continual wrangling over the origin and nature of literary form that enlightened the pair's many disagreements. Of particular interest, the correspondence documents a largely unexplored aspect of Burke's career - his reciprocally influential relationship with the writers of the late modern and midcentury periods.

Protagoras and Logos brings together in a meaningful synthesis the contributions and rhetoric of the first and most famous of the Older Sophists, Protagoras of Abdera. This book reassesses the philosophical and pedagogical contributions of Protagoras.

At the same time a reading of Kenneth Burke and of tourist landscapes in America, Gregory Clark's new study explores the rhetorical power connected with American tourism. Looking specifically at a time when citizens of the United States first took to rail and then highway to become sightseers in their own country, Clark traces the rhetorical function of a wide-ranging set of tourist experiences. He explores how the symbolic experiences Americans share as tourists have helped residents of a vast and diverse nation adopt a national identity. In doing so he suggests that the rhetorical power of a national culture is wielded not only by public discourse but also by public experiences. Clark examines places in the American landscape that have facilitated such experiences, including New York City, Shaker villages, Yellowstone National Park, the Lincoln Highway, San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and the Grand Canyon. He examines the rhetorical power of these sites to transformprivate individuals into public citizens, and he evaluates a national culture that teaches Americans to experience certain places as potent symbols of national community. Invoking Burke's concept of ""identification"" to explain such rhetorical encounters, Clark considers Burke's lifelong study of symbols - linguistic and otherwise - and their place in the construction and transformation of individual identity. Clark turns to Burke's work to expand our awareness of the rhetorical resources that lead individuals within a community to adopt a collective identity, and he considers the implications of nineteenth and twentieth-century tourism for both visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of display.

Now known to the Chinese as the ""ten years of chaos,"" the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought death to thousands of Chinese and persecution to millions. Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution identifies the rhetorical features and explores the persuasive effects of political language and symbolic practices during the period. Xing Lu examines how leaders of the Communist Party constructed and enacted a rhetoric in political contexts to legitimize power and violence and to dehumanize a group of people identified as class enemies. Lu provides close readings of the movement's primary texts - political slogans, official propaganda, wall posters, and the lyrics of mass songs and model operas. She also scrutinizes such ritualistic practices as the loyalty dance, denunciation rallies, political study sessions, and criticism and self-criticism meetings. Lu enriches her rhetorical analyses of these texts with her own story and that of her family, as well as with interviews conducted in China and the United States with persons who experienced the Cultural Revolution during their teenage years. Through rhetorical analyses Lu addresses the questions of why such a cultural holoc

In this study of the discourse involved in martial deliberations, Ronald H. Carpenter examines the rhetoric employed by naval and military commanders as they recommend specific tactics and strategies to peers as well as presidents. Drawing on ideas of rhetorical thinking from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke, Carpenter identifies two concepts of particular importance to the military decision-making process: prudence and the representative anecdote. Carpenter suggests that attention to these two concepts enables an understanding of how military commanders settle on a course of action and persuade others to support them. Carpenter turns for illustration and insight to key case studies in which military commanders centered their rhetoric on representative anecdotes involving earlier campaigns. He shows Douglas MacArthur persuading the Joint Chiefs of Staff to act on his plan for the Inchon attack; Maxwell Taylor reacting to Robert Kennedy's invocation of Pearl Harbor in deliberations during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Japanese and American commanders deliberating during the battles of Pearl Harbor and Midway; and Orde Wingate, Bull Halsey, and MacArthur debating strategy in the Pacific. In all such deliberations the primary focus is the prudent course. Carpenter suggests that the trend in contemporary society from authoritarianism toward management by persuasion, explanation, and expertise similarly permeates the military. He contends that rhetorical proficiency in martial deliberations can be as important for a military leader as tactical and strategic expertise.

Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together a distinguished group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasive form of rhetorical activity. Editor Lawrence J. Prelli notes in his introduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. The volume provides an integrated, comprehensive study of the processes of selecting what to reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Surveying major historical transformations in the relationship between rhetoric and display, this book also identifies the leading themes in relevant scholarship of the past three decades. Seventeen case studies canvass a representative and diverse range of displays - from body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in gambling casinos - and examine the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences. Collectively the contributors shed light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.

Once nearly as ubiquitous as dictionaries and cookbooks are today, letter-writing manuals and their predecessors served to instruct individuals not only on the art of letter composition but also, in effect, on personal conduct. Poster and Mitchell contend that the study of letter-writing theory, which bridges rhetorical theory and grammatical studies, represents an emerging discipline in need of definition. In this volume, they gather the contributions of eleven experts to sketch the contours of epistolary theory and collect the historic and bibliographic materials - from Isocrates to email - that form the basis for its study.

In ""Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric"", Robert Danisch examines the search by America's first generation of pragmatists for a unique set of rhetorics that would serve the needs of a developing democracy. Digging deep into pragmatism's historical development, Danisch sheds light on its association with an alternative but significant and often overlooked tradition. He draws parallels between the rhetorics of such American pragmatists as John Dewey and Jane Addams and those of the ancient Greek tradition. Danisch contends that, while building upon a classical foundation, pragmatism sought to determine rhetorical responses to contemporary irresolutions. Danisch highlights the similarities between pragmatism and classical rhetoric, including pragmatism's rejection of philosophy with its traditional assumptions and practices. Grounding his argument on an alternative interpretation of pragmatism and its antifoundationalist commitments, he discusses the need to find appropriate rhetorics for American democracy and to delineate the intellectual conditions for the realization of such rhetorics. Danisch suggests that first-generation pragmatists articulated an orientation to the world that necessitates the practice of rhetoric. To establish such claims, he addresses William James's philosophy of pluralism, Dewey's attention to the practical arts, Addams's belief in a social democracy, Alain Locke's celebration of African American art, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's judicial decisions. In each instance, Danisch shows how different iterations of pragmatism point to and recommend the development of unique rhetorics capable of shaping particular forms of democratic life.

This work is an investigation into the persuasive techniques inherent in presentations of identity. Anderson constructs a rhetorical theory for understanding persuasive strategies involved in the expression of personal identity. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's ""Dialectic of Constitutions,"" Anderson analyzes conversion narratives to illustrate how the authors of these autobiographical texts describe dramatic changes in their identities as a means of influencing the beliefs and action of their readers. The concept of Identity conveys the idea that people possess a certain capacity for self-understanding and self-definition. Communicating this self-interpretation is inherently rhetorical. Expanding on Burkean concepts of human symbol use, Anderson works to parse and critique such inevitable persuasive ends of identity constitution. Anderson examines the strategic presentation of identity in four narratives of religious, sexual, political, and mystical conversions: Catholic social activist Dorothy Day's ""The Long Loneliness"", political commentator David Brock's ""Blinded by the Right"", Deirdre McCloskey's memoir of transgender transformation, ""Crossing"", and the well-known Native American text ""Black Elk Speaks"". Mapping the strategies in each, Anderson points toward a broader understanding of how identity is made - and how it is made persuasive.

This book looks into communicating psychiatric patient histories, from the asylum years to the clinics of today. In this engrossing study of tales of mental illness, Carol Berkenkotter examines the evolving role of case history narratives in the growth of psychiatry as a medical profession. ""Patient Tales"" follows the development of psychiatric case histories from their origins at Edinburgh Medical School and the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary in the mid - eighteenth century to the medical records of contemporary American mental health clinics. Spanning two centuries and several disciplines, Berkenkotter's investigation illustrates how discursive changes in this genre mirrored evolving assumptions and epistemological commitments among those who cared for the mentally ill.During the asylum era, case histories were a means by which practitioners organized and disseminated local knowledge through professional societies, affiliations, and journals. The way in which these histories were recorded was subsequently codified, giving rise to a genre. In her thorough reading of Sigmund Freud's ""Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria"", Berkenkotter shows how this account of Freud's famous patient 'Dora' led to technical innovation in the genre through the incorporation of literary devices. In the volume's final section, Berkenkotter carries the discussion forward to the present in her examination of the turn from psychoanalysis to a research-based and medically oriented classification system now utilized by the American Psychiatric Association. Throughout her work, Berkenkotter stresses the value of reading case histories as an interdisciplinary bridge between the humanities and sciences.

This title offers a fresh approach to understanding Kenneth Burke's landmark cultural theory as a rhetorical response to war.In ""Burke, War, Words"", M. Elizabeth Weiser reinserts Kenneth Burke's theory of dramatism into the social milieu from which it originated, fostering a new understanding of how this concept of motivation was itself motivated by war and criticism. Weiser's model of a new approach to historiography contextualizes.Dramatism was a direct response to the global crisis wrought by World War II and to Burke's thenongoing debates with New Critics, sociolinguists, political activists, and government propagandists over the role of language and communication to affect the world. Central to Burke's germinal volume ""A Grammar of Motives"", dramatism was a call to action advocating informed social dialogue at a time when an allied victory seemed dependent instead on rallying behind a single strong voice in a unity not unlike that mandated by fascism itself. Weiser contends that Burke conceived dramatism as an alternative to New Criticism and as a blueprint for a dialectical resolution that was an antifascist rhetorical response to war.Weiser draws from published and unpublished communications between Burke and the diverse and divergent literati of his era as well as from Burke's scholarly, political, and even poetic writings of the time. From this context she is able to map the complex arc of formulating ""A Grammar of Motives"" in Burke's larger wartime discourse. For Weiser establishing the origins of dramatism offers a model for enhancing our understanding of other rhetorical theories as well as a specific renewal of purpose for dramatism as an action-oriented tool to engage intellectuals in our conflicted age as Burke had envisioned in his.

This is a collection of rhetorical case studies that fathom the construction and destruction of communities.In ""Rhetoric and Community"", seventeen contributors explore an area of growing scholarly interest - how rhetoric defines, rallies, polarizes, and marginalizes specific communities. The contributors consider such contentious issues as how individuals are forged into communities, what sustains constructive communities, how communities become fragmented, and what leads to divisions of race, class, and gender, the rhetoric of hatred and violence, or failures of public discussion to resolve common problems.The volume creates its own dialogue through seven case studies, each including an interpretive essay and response. The studies range from historical investigations of feminist and African American communities, to commentaries on military decision making and the rhetoric of war, to reflections on contemporary artistic and scientific communities. Unified by their common interest in discourse and community, the essays contribute new understandings of how rhetoric not only reflects but also shapes the character of specific communities and their place in society.

This book offers a provocative rhetorical approach to one of the defining medical debates of our time.Michael J. Hyde's pathbreaking study considers the relationship between the phenomenon of conscience and the practice of rhetoric as it relates to the controversial issues of euthanasia. Hyde investigates how the practice of rhetoric becomes a voice of conscience and influences the moral standards of individuals and communities. In doing so, he offers the first extensive treatment of Martin Heidegger's and Emmanuel Levinas' philosophical investigations of conscience and an in-depth analysis of the justifiability and social acceptability of euthanasia.Hyde establishes the theoretical basis of his study by discussing and critically assessing the phenomenological theories of conscience set forth in the works of the two philosophers. To illustrate how the relationship between the call of conscience and the practice of rhetoric shows itself in everyday existence, Hyde surveys the moral discourse that informs ongoing debates over euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. He focuses on a cluster of related topics that emerge from his discussion of the work of Heidegger and Levinas, including the phenomena of deconstruction and acknowledgment, emotion and the reconstructive power of language, and the discursive creation of heroes.

This title provides an introduction to the rhetorical tradition of sophistical dialectics in antiquity.In ""Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece"", John Poulakos offers a new conceptualization of sophistry, explaining its direction and shape as well as the reasons why Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle found it objectionable. Poulakos argues that a proper understanding of sophistical rhetoric requires a grasp of three cultural dynamics of the fifth century B.C.: the logic of circumstances, the ethic of competition, and the aesthetic of exhibition. Traced to such phenomena as everyday practices, athletic contests, and dramatic performances, these dynamics set the stage for the role of sophistical rhetoric in Hellenic culture and explain why sophistry has traditionally been understood as inconsistent, agonistic, and ostentatious.In his discussion of ancient responses to sophistical rhetoric, Poulakos observes that Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle found sophistry morally reprehensible, politically useless, and theoretically incoherent. At the same time, they produced their own version of rhetoric that advocated ethical integrity, political unification, and theoretical coherence. Poulakos explains that these responses and alternative versions were motivated by a search for solutions to such historical problems as moral uncertainty, political instability, and social disorder. Poulakos concludes that sophistical rhetoric was as necessary in its day as its Platonic, Isocratean, and Aristotelian counterparts were in theirs.

This is a revaluing of rhetoric in the educational model of the father of humanistic studies. ""Speaking for the Polis"" considers Isocrates' educational program from the perspective of rhetorical theory and explores its relation to sociopolitical practices. Illumining Isocrates' efforts to reformulate sophistic conceptions of rhetoric on the basis of the intellectual and political debates of his times, Takis Poulakos contends that the father of humanistic studies and rival educator of Plato crafted a version of rhetoric that gave the art an important new role in the ethical and political activities of Athens.Poulakos demonstrates how Isocrates adopted, transformed, and put to new tasks Protagorean and Gorgianic notions of rhetoric and how he used rhetoric to resolve tensions between political equality and social inequality. Poulakos suggests that Isocrates' rhetorical endeavors gained stability through narratives of values and shared commitments, credence through seasoned arguments about plausible solutions to political discord, and weight through the convergence of the speaker's words and quality of character.

This work offers a provocative reconsideration of two competing classical approaches to discourse, politics, and education. ""Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle"" presents Isocrates' vision of discourse as a worthy rival, rather than a mere precursor, of Aristotle's Rhetoric. Casting Isocrates and Aristotle as opponents in a debate over the character, resources, and ends of rhetorical education, Ekaterina V. Haskins argues that much of what Aristotle had to say about the status of rhetoric and the role of discourse in the life of a Greek city-state may have been an implicit reaction to Isocrates. Haskins finds that Isocrates offers a more comprehensive and culturally attuned theory of civic discourse and education than does Aristotle, whose intellectual project disengages moral philosophy from the contingencies of public culture and introduces rhetoric merely as an art serviceable to a philosophically trained statesman. Haskins terms Isocrates' approach to discourse 'constitutive' and Aristotle's 'instrumental' and shows how the former is more congenial to the goals of contemporary rhetorical theory and pedagogy.

This title presents an innovative approach to Dewey's view of rhetoric as art, revealing an 'ontology of becoming'. In ""Democracy and Rhetoric"", Nathan Crick articulates from John Dewey's body of work a philosophy of rhetoric that reveals the necessity for bringing forth a democratic life infused with the spirit of ethics, a method of inquiry, and a sense of beauty. Crick relies on rhetorical theory as well interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, history, sociology, aesthetics, and political science as he demonstrates that significant engagement with issues of rhetoric and communication are central to Dewey's political philosophy. In his rhetorical reading of Dewey, Crick examines the sophistical underpinnings of Dewey's philosophy and finds it much informed by notions of radical individuality, aesthetic experience, creative intelligence, and persuasive advocacy as essential to the formation of communities of judgment. Crick illustrates that for Dewey rhetoric is an art situated within a complex and challenging social and natural environment, wielding influence and authority for those well versed in its methods and capable of experimenting with its practice. From this standpoint the unique and necessary function of rhetoric in a democracy is to advance minority views in such a way that they might have the opportunity to transform overarching public opinion through persuasion in an egalitarian public arena. The truest power of rhetoric in a democracy then is the liberty for one to influence the many through free, full, and fluid communication. Ultimately Crick argues that Dewey's sophistical rhetorical values and techniques form a naturalistic 'ontology of becoming' in which discourse is valued for its capacity to guide a self, a public, and a world in flux toward some improved incarnation. Appreciation of this ontology of becoming - of democracy as a communication-driven work in progress - gives greater social breadth and historical scope to Dewey's philosophy while solidifying his lasting contributions to rhetoric in an active and democratic public sphere.

Sufi Aesthetics argues that the interpretive keys to erotic Sufi poems and their medieval commentaries lie in understanding a unique perceptual experience. Using careful analysis of primary texts, Cyrus Ali Zargar explores the theoretical and poetic pronouncements of two major Muslim mystics, Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240) and Fakhr al-Din 'Iraqi (d. 1289), under the premise that behind any literary tradition exist organic aesthetic values. The complex assertions of these Sufis appear not as abstract theory, but as a way of seeing all things, including the sensory world.In this study Zargar responds to a long-standing debate in the study of Sufi poetics over the use of erotic language to describe the divine. He argues that such language results from an altered perception of Muslim mystics in which divine beauty and human beauty are seen as one reality. The Sufi masters, Zargar asserts, shared an aesthetic vision quite different from those who have often studied them. Sufism's foremost theoretician, Ibn 'Arabi, is presented from a neglected perspective as a poet, aesthete, and lover of the human form. Ibn 'Arabi in fact proclaimed a view of human beauty markedly similar to that of many mystics from a Persian contemplative school of thought, the "School of Passionate Love," which would later find its epitome in 'Iraqi, one of Persian literature's most celebrated poet-saints. Many in this school advocated the controversial practice of gazing at beautiful human faces, a topic Zargar also discusses.The examination of central Sufi texts in Persian and Arabic establishes that the profundity attributed to mystical encounters with the sensory and supersensory has far-reaching extensions in evaluations of that which is seen, that which is deemed beautiful, and that which is expressed as a result. Through this aesthetic approach, this comparative study overturns assumptions made not only about Sufism and classical Arabic and Persian poetry, but also other uses of erotic imagery in Muslim approaches to sexuality, the human body, and the paradise of the afterlife described in the Qur'an.

This builds on the foundation of Guy L. Beck's earlier work, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound, which described the theoretical role of sound in Hindu thought. Sonic Liturgy continues the discussion of sound into the realm of Hindu ritual and musical traditions of worship.

Xing Lu examines language, art, persuasion, and argumentation in ancient China and offers a detailed and authentic account of ancient Chinese rhetorical theories and practices within the society's philosophical, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts. She focuses on the works of five schools of thought and ten well-known Chinese thinkers from Confucius to Han Feizi to the the Later Mohists.Lu compares Chinese rhetorical perspectives with those of the ancient Greeks, illustrating that the Greeks and the Chinese shared a view of rhetoric as an ethical enterprise and of speech as a rational and psychological activity. The two traditions differed, however, in their rhetorical education, sense of rationality, perceptions of the role of language, approach to the treatment and study of rhetoric, and expression of emotions. Lu also links ancient Chinese rhetorical perspectives with contemporary Chinese interpersonal and political communication behavior and offers suggestions for a multicultural rhetoric that recognizes both culturally specific and transcultural elements of human communication.

An examination of the discourse of political prisoners as a form of vernacular rhetoricPrisoners of Conscience continues the work begun by Gerard A. Hauser in Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, winner of the National Communication Association's Hochmuth Nichols Award. In his new book, Hauser examines the discourse of political prisoners, specifically the discourse of prisoners of conscience, as a form of rhetoric in which the vernacular is the main source of available appeals and the foundation for political agency. Hauser explores how modes of resistance employed by these prisoners constitute what he deems a ""thick moral vernacular"" rhetoric of human rights. Hauser's work considers in part how these prisoners convert universal commitments to human dignity, agency, and voice into the moral vernacular of the society and culture to which their rhetoric is addressed. Hauser grounds his study through a series of case studies, each centred on a different rhetorical mechanism brought to bear in the act of resistance. Through a transnational rhetorical analysis of resistance within political prisons, Hauser brings to bear his skills as a rhetorical theorist and critic to illuminate the rhetorical power of resistance as tied to core questions in contemporary humanistic scholarship and public concern.