The Ethos of Rhetoric (review)

Despite its uninspiring title, The Ethos of Rhetoric is a provocative blend of works that treats the subject of ethos diversely in traditional and nontraditional ways. The 11 essays in this book, edited by Michael J. Hyde, were first presented at the 2002 Annual Convention of the Southern States Speech Communication Association. The main theoretical texts grounding these essays are Aristotle's Rhetoric and Martin Heidegger's works on ethos, particularly his book Being and Time. Thus Hyde's book expands the traditional Aristotelian notion of ethos as "credibility" and explores various interpretations of ethos, in Heidegger's theory, as "dwelling place."

In the introduction, Hyde eloquently touches on his personal interpretation of ethos as "an essential relationship that exists among the self, communal existence, discourse, Being, and, perhaps, God" (xiv). All of these potentialities of ethos, like those in the essays, not only can be understood as but also can be interchanged with the term dwelling. The ambiguity of "ethos as dwelling" imparts multifarious conceptions of ethos in all 11 chapters. The essays treat a variety of topics: the ethos of Aristotle's writings, the process of invention, the African American, personhood, rhetorical criticism, human nature and judgment, the human capacity to recognize beauty, democracy, contemporary rhetoric as a social practice, nationalism, and human-computer interaction. The first four essays theorize primarily upon the relationship between ethos and rhetoric; the following seven use ethos as a critical lens to examine specific topics.

Given the communication concepts in this book, it is best suited to the rhetorical researcher or practitioner. Still, some essays would appeal to those outside the field, including students and scholars of political science, history, and even poetry. Those with the broadest appeal to wider audiences: Craig R. Smith's "Ethos Dwells Pervasively: A Hermeneutic Reading of Aristotle on Credibility"; Martin J. Medhurst's "Religious Rhetoric and the Ethos of Democracy: A Case Study of the 2000 Presidential Campaign"; David Zarefsky's "George W. Bush Discovers Rhetoric: September 20, 2001, and the U.S. Response to Terrorism"; and Carole Blair and Neil Michel's "The Rushmore Effect: Ethos and National Identity."

The most poignant essay is John Poulakos's "Special Delivery: Rhetoric, Letter Writing, and the Question of Beauty," which addresses ethos as the human awareness of beauty even in the face of human ugliness. Poulakos analyses a 1966 letter written by a soldier in Vietnam, who details a moment's sight of "soft, red flowers" amidst a "country of thorns and cuts, of guns and marauding, of little hope and great failure," a contrast that reminds the soldier of "a beautiful thought, gesture, and even person . . . waving bravely at the death that pours down upon it" (89). This essay captures and illuminates a moment of humanity, treating ethos as recognition of beauty and challenging more narrow conceptions of ethos addressed by Aristotle and Lloyd Bitzer. Poulakos condemns contemporary suspicion of beauty as deceit or falseness.

Although Poulakos's approach to ethos as a (mental) dwelling place is lucid and inspiring, some other essays are laden with jargon, long complicated sentences, and slightly inflated language. Such an example is Barbara Warnick's "The Ethos of Rhetorical Criticism: Enlarging the Dwelling of Critical Praxis." Warnick addresses a pertinent topic—the ethos of rhetorical criticism—and she sets up an ordered layout to address the rhetorical critic's "four divisive issues." The barrage of ideas from a litany of outside scholars, however, drowns out Warnick's own voice.

Similarly, Carolyn R. Miller's "Expertise and Agency: Transformations of Ethos in Human-Computer Interaction" incorporates the work of Paul Edwards (The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America) to treat the rhetoric of "machine control" and "computational subjectivity" (199). This essay may interest the computer technician/rhetorician, but readers unversed in the vocabulary of "expert systems" such as DEFT and XCON, however, may find unpacking the arguments challenging.

Scholars of politics, political rhetoric, or political science will enjoy contributions by Medhurst and Zarefsky...