A Man and a Perpetuum Mobile? Assigned Hermaphrodite Andreas Bruce's Memoirs

This article presents the memoirs of Andreas Bruce, a Swedish man that was assigned female sex at birth and later re-assigned sex as a male hermaphrodite. His memoirs, written by the end of the nineteenth century, are unique. They exhibit a rare example of what life could be like for gender transgressors during the nineteenth century. According to the memoirs, Bruce's transition and legal gender recognition was the source of some attention, but once he had gained a certificate of hermaphroditism and a male first name, his masculinity seldom seems to have been contested. Bruce navigates between describing himself as an ordinary man and describing his life story as unique.     

试论戴震的语法修辞成就

戴震是乾嘉时期最著名的考据学家,在中国语言文字学史上有着重要的地位。学术界对其音韵学说和反程朱理学思想讨论较多,但对他的语法修辞观则因材料分散,注意者很少。实际上,戴氏关于汉语语法修辞方面的观点与实践,在语法学和修辞学发展史上都具有一定影响。     

Presidential Coequality: The Evolution of a Concept

The assertion that the presidency is coequal in power to the other branches in the American system of government is often heard, has been suggested by all recent presidents, and has even made its way into political science. But tracing the history of the concept demonstrates that this assertion is an invention of quite recent vintage. Those who wrote and favored the Constitution did not make such claims, nor did early presidents. Even Andrew Jackson's famous and, to his generation, shocking assertion of coequality coincident with his censure was not really a claim of equal power between branches. According to our systematic analysis of presidential rhetoric it was Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who initiated and popularized the idea of interbranch coequality. They did so to defend themselves in two episodes of substantial presidential vulnerability: Watergate and the ensuing midterm elections. Subsequent presidents have elevated something that would have seemed wrong and absurd to any founder into a blithe truism. This belief harms governance by creating both artificially high expectations for the president and a presumption of institutional stasis. The “second constitution” based on popular beliefs about interbranch relations continues to evolve, as much a product of happenstance as of rational design.     

The Ubiquity of Rhetoric and Hermeneutic Philosophy

This essay examines how hermeneutic philosophy, particularly Gadamer's, recovers rhetoric, less as the art of speaking well than as a statement of a truth of the sensus communis, that which communicates veracious content through argumentation. This is the sense in which Gadamer acknowledges the ubiquity of rhetoric and hermeneutics as components of linguisticity (Sprachlichkeit). Conceived in the context of non-methodical wisdom and phronesis, Gadamer's rehabilitated rhetoric is concerned with pragmatics and ethics. Rhetoric is no longer viewed as a technique of verbal manipulation and becomes relevant for dialogic communication. Gadamer thus joins the Habermasian criticism of formalized reason that is detached from values. Both of them reject instrumental reason, because it has colonized communicational reason. However, since Gadamer's view of rhetoric has also been criticized by Habermas and Ricoeur their objections cannot be overlooked in a discussion of his hermeneutics. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the implications of the debate on rhetoric, hermeneutics, and communication for the twenty-first century.     

Visual Persuasion in George W. Bush's Presidency: Cowboy Imagery in Public Discourse

Discussion of George W. Bush's rhetoric typically focuses on his spoken address, yet his use of cowboy visuals also qualifies as public communication. By visually identifying himself as a cowboy Bush associated his presidency with the story of the mythic cowboy, a powerful concept in American culture. While visual images are typically not considered a substantive and rational form of political communication, Bush's cowboy persona, emphasized visually, prompted widespread debate about his leadership style and approach to national problems, particularly terrorism. While many did not agree with his policies, the simplicity of the visual message and the foundational nature of the cowboy story provided a narrative that prompted a national debate on substantive issues of the day. Language is still considered the critical element of political debate, but as Bush's experience demonstrates, rhetoric includes visual communication as well.     

Ten years on: Obama's war on terrorism in rhetoric and practice

Ten years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long‐term struggle with what George W. Bush termed the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘war on terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the Bush administration policy, conducting a counterterrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective—smarter, better, nimbler, stronger. This article demonstrates, however, that those expecting wholesale changes to US counterterrorism policy misread Obama's intentions. It argues that Obama always intended to deepen Bush's commitment to counterterrorism while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush's institutionalized construction of a global war on terror, the continuities in counterterrorism can be explained by Obama's shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US. The article assesses whether Obama has pursued a more effective counterterrorism policy than his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantánamo Bay and torture, the uses of unmanned drone attacks and domestic wire‐tapping, this article argues that Obama's ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last ten years but also that it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.     

Building Alliances or Rallying the Base: Civil Religious Rhetoric and the Modern Presidency

Abstract

Civil religious rhetoric has been utilized throughout American history to legitimize political interests by drawing upon broadly shared beliefs regarding the nation’s identity, meaning, and purpose in the world. Although scholars have traditionally assumed this rhetoric was employed to unify the nation, others emphasize its potential to exacerbate conflict as policy debates morph into battles over the national identity. This research project analyzes presidential speeches from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama (1939–2012) and finds that the type of speech delivered, public approval of the president, and the partisan composition of Congress influence the prevalence of civil religious rhetoric. It concludes that modern presidents have more often relied upon civil religion to rally the partisan base than build alliances with the opposition.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.     

Recent Books in the Field of Medieval Languages and Literatures

This article examines the contradictions underlying the Falangist feminine ideal as it oscillated between demure/traditional and enterprising/modern in the rhetoric of the Sección Femenina. As the author demonstrates, the peculiarity of the Sección Femenina—which acted as the dominant cultural filter for women's familial, social, and political obligations at the time—stems from its leaders' at once-dominated (vis-à-vis the state) and dominant (vis-à-vis the female constituents) position in the cultural, social, national, and political landscape of post-civil war Spain. Although the retrograde ways of the Sección Femenina, whose statutes and rhetoric drew on the nineteenth-century bourgeois discourse of different and complementary gender relations, have elicited numerous studies, this article examines the use of this familiar and unthreatening (to the regime) model of female formation as the legitimating basis of its unconventional praxis.     

The historical roots of differing rural gender orders in Norway and Sweden

Offering a systematic comparison of the history of the differing rural gender orders that have developed in Norway and Sweden since 1750, this article considers the complex interconnections between gender and capitalist relations. It begins by highlighting the contrasts between these two Scandinavian countries’ settlement patterns, agricultural structures and rural gender orders, in spite of the similarities in their environments, social-democratic policies and commitments to gender equality. Within a theoretical framework focused on the persistence of simple commodity production by farming families within capitalist economies, it considers the gender division of labour, commodity systems, and laws of succession and inheritance as they bear upon the positions of farm women in Norway and Sweden. Tracing the development of stratification in the countryside and the history of farmers’ political activism at the national level illuminates the salient differences between these two countries’ histories from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries. This comparison demonstrates that gender as well as the mobilization of rural citizens shaped the transition to capitalism and that, in turn, agricultural and settlement policies reshaped rural gender relations.     

President Obama,the Bible,and Political Rhetoric

Abstract

How has President Obama made use of the Bible in his political rhetoric, especially as it relates to public policy debates? This article addresses Obama's religious origins, his work as a community organizer in Chicago, his coming to Christian faith under the leadership of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the development of his understanding regarding the relationship between faith and politics. In particular President Obama has emphasized the notion that we are all our brothers' and sisters' keepers. He also stresses the present generation of black Americans as "the Joshua Generation." The article considers President Obama's hermeneutics, as well as the important context of the black church for his own use of Scripture. The lenses of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr are also addressed as they relate to Obama's use of Scripture in political rhetoric.     

A portrait of the chief as a general paralytic: rhetorics of sexual pathology in the Parnell split*

The O’Shea trial and the ensuing fall of Charles Stewart Parnell occupy an epochal position in accounts of the sexual politics of Victorian Britain and the development of Irish nationalism. This article examines how the “Parnell myth” came to serve (and was constructed from the outset) as a symbolic edifice within which anxieties concerning the relationship between Irishness and sexuality could be foregrounded and negotiated. In particular, it will analyse Timothy Healy’s influential post-split denunciations of Parnell, and the rhetoric of sexual contagion through which they were conducted, a campaign which set the discursive terms of twentieth-century mainstream Irish nationalism. Through an analysis of Healy’s post-split journalism, contemporary political memoirs by T.P. O’Connor, and a range of nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric texts, this article will highlight the ways in which discourses of sexual health were used to reshape Parnell’s public persona at the level of gender and ethno-national affiliation. In doing so, it will illustrate how a sensitivity to the history of medicine can enrich critical understandings of a crucial moment in the political and cultural history of Ireland, and shed fresh light on the vexed collocation of Irish identity and sexual purity which the Parnell split reinforced.     

The Role of Faith in Historical Research

The implied strategy and the history projected in the new book of Jens Bruun Kofoed, Text and History, fails to measure up to the critical principles of both theology and science established by Thomas Acquinas' centuries' old distinction between faith and reason. An apologetic intention in Kofoed's book attempts to demonstrate that the biblical history of his evangelical faith is not unreasonable. Thomas Thompson, on the other hand, thinks it is necessary to hold the line between faith and science, which St. Thomas drew some seven centuries ago. What Kofoed argues in an effort to project a history of Israel, which would be an alternative to that of the “Copenhagen school” is not science. Nor are his rules of evidence those that the world of secular history requires. Led by an apologetic rhetoric and understanding of historical argument, Kofoed's revised Århus dissertation is dominated by a critique of the “Copenhagen school,” which attempts to show that an alternative answer is not impossible. Although emphasizing the historical methods of Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche in his critique, Kofoed neglects to include in his discussion their discussions of method or, in Lemche's case, anything he has written before 1991. His understanding of their dependency on the Annales school is clearly mistaken as is his understanding of the debates about the relationship between historicity, genre and composition. Finally, his discussion of the comparative method is misleading and ill informed.     

The role of Finland in the Swedish national and war economies during Sweden's period as a great power

The primary goal of this article is to present anti-Semitism as the underlying reason for the rejection of Israel-Jakob Schur's PhD dissertation at the University of Helsinki and at Åbo Akademi University in the late 1930s. The article analyzes the different stages of the processes and the ideological background and motives underpinning the rejections. Schur's antagonists were right-wing professors, some of whom sympathized with National Socialism and/or maintained contacts with eminent German anti-Semitic ideologues. The article analyzes the rhetoric of the written statements, which contain ideas of Christian anti-Semitism as well as other anti-Jewish stances. Moreover, the article demonstrates that Schur was regarded as an alien element in the Finnish academe, and the topic of his research – circumcision – was considered non-national from the perspective of Finnish science.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.     

Hume's oscillating civilization theory

Hume's repeated mentions of the vicissitudes of civilization have thus far been neglected, overlooked, or misinterpreted by Hume scholars. Although his references to the “death” or “ruin” of a nation are somewhat hyperbolic, his cyclical view of history was neither mere rhetoric nor necessarily pessimistic. This paper aims to show that Hume's notion of historical fluctuations was deeply connected with his understanding of the universality of human nature. It also placed Hume in a strategic position from which he could criticize both those who believed in the possibility of perpetual progress and those who forecast the successive decline of the human world. To explore Hume's position in more detail, we must first examine the reasons his argument was often misunderstood, especially in the context of the “rich country–poor country” debate. We also need to examine how Hume's view of the cyclical nature of history, consistently held, can be reconciled with his status as one of the champions of modern civilization.     

Do Not Say That You Have Forgotten King and Father: Yunqi Zhuhong’s Chan Realism

This essay examines the late Ming-dynasty Chan master Yunqi Zhuhong’s commentary on the Brahma Net Sutra (Fanwangjing), which it takes up in order to explore his discourse concerning both Chan realism and his ensuing rejection of mainstream Chan gongan rhetoric. The Brahma Net Sutra contains a list of major and minor precepts governing proper morality for monastic and lay Buddhists. Zhuhong’s interpretation of the Twenty-First Minor Precept, which prohibits revenge, offers insight into his sense of political realism regarding the relationship between gradual teachings, provisional truths, and ultimate truth. His interpretation of the Tenth Minor Precept, which prohibits storing weapons, demonstrates his moral realism in contrast to Chan’s traditional use of pedagogical violence. Zhuhong’s realist discourse, influenced by the teachings of the Buddhist Vinaya as well as by engagement with Confucian ethics, presents an overlooked counter-narrative shift that contrasts with the emphasis on sudden enlightenment and antinomianism in Chan gongan discourse typical of the Tang and Song dynasties.