(Self-)Portrait of Prof. R.C.: A Retrospective

Should Scholars Delineate a Data Set Apart from a Research Project? Considering Objects, Methods, and Purposes for Studying Presidential Rhetoric

“…In a survey of metadiscussions of critical method spanning more than a half century, Charles Morris details rhetoricians' struggles with method. Investigating a 1957 special issue of Western Speech assessing the state of rhetorical criticism, Morris discerns a “methodological intervention” introducing approaches such as Burkean criticism while simultaneously resisting method as the “mechanistic, formulaic, scientific application of an apparatus” (2010, 12). In the subsequent special issues of Western on rhetorical criticism leading to Morris' 2010 contribution, as well as elsewhere in the field, scholars have struggled to negotiate the uses and abuses of method.…”

Between abundance and marginalization: the imperative of racial rhetorical criticism

“…to our understanding of the process of political judgment and the relationship between judgment and discursive practice." 10 Charles Morris notes that "We're still puzzling over criticism as art, and those contexts that make critical meaning, judgment, and action expansive, provocative, generative; in a word, powerful," 11 while Raymie McKerrow observes: "there is much that matters in this practice." 12 It is this rhetorical critical move to ethics, judgment, and evaluation-to all the matterings-that centers the work we do.…”

“The Quare in the Square”: Queer Memory, Sensibilities, and Oscar Wilde

“…47 As such, memory has increasingly become a vital resource in (re)framing the queer past, particularly for rhetorical scholars who have already investigated the intersections of sexuality and materiality, violence, montage, affect, mobility, and criticism, among others. 48 In the case of Osborne's Wilde monument, this reframing is done, in part, by adopting different approaches to time, particularly by marking Wilde's gay frame as an anachronism. Anachronism is defined as "a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place … especially … one from a former age that is incongruous in the present."…”