Papers presented at the 13th biennial conference of the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), held May 23-26, 2008 in Seattle, Wash.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Plenary address : reclaiming rhetoric's responsibilities / David Zarefsky -- Rousseau, rhetoric, and the promise of contractual politics / David Tell -- Rhetoric, virtue, and the necessity of invention / William Duffy -- "Licentia" in the seventeenth-century French pulpit / Claudia Carlos -- The functions of polemical discourse in the public sphere / Ruth Amossy -- Form is a feminist issue / Eve Wiederhold -- Knifing Orlan's mask : grotesque aesthetics as visceral resistance to commodification / Jane Munksgaard -- Audre Lorde's embodied invention / Lester C. Olson -- La Frontera y El Chamizal : liminality, territoriality, and visual discourse / Brian J. McNely -- Public deliberation and the rhetorical "real" : balancing accomplishment and complication in Republican-Democratic structures / Todd Kelshaw -- Changing the public face of Christian politics : the rhetoric of Sojourners / Barbara Little Liu -- The temporality and function of "ethical shifting" in discursive interaction / Stephen R. Yarbrough -- Edit this page : Wikipedia and the responsibilities of digital rhetorics / James J. Brown, Jr. -- Aesthetics and rhetoric in The Oprah Winfrey Show / Kathleen Dixon -- Textual and visual building blocks : agency and social responsibility in Christine de Pizan's "The city of ladies" / Julia M. Smith -- The constitutive rhetoric of Common Sense / David C. Hoffman -- Paternalistic rhetoric and the American people / Jay P. Childers -- Rustic experience and the rhetorical work of national park architecture / Gregory Clark -- Eugenics, Nazism, and the sinister science of the Human Betterment Foundation / Kathleen A. Swift -- Synecdoche as figure of the Holocaust / Richard Glejzer & Michael Bernard-Donals -- The Arabs did not "just" translate Aristotle : Al-Farabi's logico-rhetorical theory / Maha Baddar -- The cynic / Charles Johnson -- Loyalty oaths and the letter of the law : rhetoric, resistance, and responsibility / M. Karen Powers -- Scholarship of engagement : both a new name for and a challenge to the work of rhetoric / Richard C. Gebhardt -- Gender equity in the Rhetoric Society of America / Cheryl Geisler -- I told u so : classical and contemporary ethos and the stabilization of self / Nathaniel A. Rivers -- Coming to terms with analogy : generativity and constraint in the work of Nagaoka, Gamow, and Freud / Joseph Little & Lisa Jane Kabasin -- Textual machinery : authorial agency and bot-written texts in Wikipedia / Krista Kennedy -- The rhetoric of the graphic novel / Kathryn E. Dobson -- The Earth Liberation Front's (ELF) failed diatribe of sacramental arson / Mark Meister & Curt Gilstrap -- "The future is ours," or is it? : the rise and fall of totalitarian rhetoric in Poland (and elsewhere) / Cezar M. Ornatowski.