Context/Exigency

Here's the original CFP for the conference:

Conference Theme
RHETORIC: CONCORD AND CONTROVERSY

I have often and seriously debated with myself whether men and communities have received more good or evil from oratory and a consuming devotion to eloquence.

Cicero

But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric.

Kenneth Burke

In the de Inventione, Cicero recognizes two opposing dimensions of rhetoric, the one divisive and conflictive, the other irenic and unifying. Kenneth Burke, in characteristic fashion, converts this either/or into a both/and. For him, rhetoric simultaneously divides and unifies, separates as it identifies and dwells most naturally in the in-between space where sameness and difference ambiguously embrace one another. The theme of our conference calls these distinctions and confusions to mind. It asks, among many other things: Does rhetoric civilize? Or does it repress and control? Or both? Does it express the self? Or dissolve it into a cultural miasma? What is the price of community gained through the language of social control? What is the limit of dissent expressed through the language of difference and personal liberation? Where do diversity and sameness meet on the human tongue and in the human condition?

We welcome any and all papers that touch on this theme or that redefine it or reconstruct it or deconstruct it. We also welcome all other papers that deal with any aspect of rhetorical scholarship-historical, theoretical, critical, pedagogical, sophistical or Platonic, Aristotelian or Foucaultian. All are welcome to meet in Minneapolis, a space between the coasts, and a place where nice is the norm, but where nastiness has left it as the only spot in the U.S. where the number of senators has equaled the number of governors for half a year. Celebrate the confusion and the order of Minnesota and of the rhetorical world to which it belongs. Join us at RSA in May.