Recently, it seems, some of my colleagues have been trying to “save my soul” from such dishonest things as rhetoric! They think that hermeneutics is no noble pursuit and that we must be suspicious of rhetoric. I had to reply that rhetoric has been the basis of our social life since Plato rejected and contradicted the flattering abuse of rhetoric by the Sophists. He introduced dialectically founded rhetoric as in the Phaedrus, and rhetoric remained a noble art throughout antiquity. Yet one wonders why today everybody is not aware of it.(55)

An understanding of the workings of sound symbolism in poetry is essential to theoretical and practical criticism alike. During the past few decades, we have come to recognize that sound-symbolic effects are solidly based on linguistic facts. Studies of the ways in which sound symbolism is put to use generally in the works of a given poet can fruitfully supplement traditional analyses of particular passages. Though Robert Frost is known for his proficiency in mimetic sound effects, the language of his “speaking voice” is not conspicuously marked by the systems of alliteration and assonance that characterize the verse of Tennyson or Swinburne. Yet such systems, among other features, appear in certain poems in a “chanting voice” associated, overtly or symbolically, with the protagonist's fear of death. Ultimately, this proves to be the poet's fear of obliteration, of succumbing to the power of a now obsolete music and thus vanishing from the poetic scene without a trace.

Lope de Vega's El primer Fajardo (c. 1610–12) chronicles the rise of a hero of the Christian Reconquest who triumphs over a Moorish opponent, Abenalfajar, and thereby earns the Moor's Castilianized name and a place in history. A gambler, he “plays [or ”wagers“] a Moor” and, in the process, subdues the images of Spanish orientalism. His parodies “transcontextualize” Moorish motifs and challenge the Reconquest's codes. During a key re-creation of a traditional ballad, “Jugando estaba el rey moro” ‘The Moorish king was playing,‘ Fajardo attacks the metaphorical depiction of Muslim-Christian tolerance. His transgressive moves colonize the domain of balladry, while his Morisco servant's malapropisms mock conventions that are elsewhere an enabling legacy. Lope's official writing as secretary to the duque de Sessa parallels some of these motifs: the aptness of a name is borne out in performance, and playing the Moor involves impersonating cultural differences, even when the aim is to eliminate the communities of represented “others.”

Recent cultural criticism and literary theory draw extensively on vernacular languages, performances, and rituals as paradigms for reading African American prose texts. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “An Ante-bellum Sermon” draws on the African American vernacular sermon and the performance of the black preacher to create a “preacherly text” that reconstructs the African American author's strategy for achieving authority with a racially divided audience. The conventions of dialect fashion a mask that evokes stereotypical minstrel images, so that Dunbar's preacher can subversively inscribe a political and racial discourse within the confines of the dominant nineteenth-century American popular culture. Dunbar's preacherly text is always double-voiced and disguised, taking full advantage of linguistic indeterminacy and using indirect verbal strategies to speak the unspeakable. In this way, “An Ante-bellum Sermon” provides us with a model for theorizing about the persisting rhetorical strategies of African American poetry.

This essay reexamines the institutional rise and fall of deconstruction as a reading method in American literary criticism. Deconstruction was, to put it bluntly, commodified for an American market, simplified and watered down for use in how-to books that gave (and continue to give) a generation of literature students an overview of what was supposedly Derrida's work without paying corresponding attention to his texts. The deconstructive criticism of de Man and Hillis Miller is too often conflated with Derrida's thought—especially surrounding the question of undecidability—and this confusion misses essential questions that Derrida poses to any critical enterprise. For rhetorical deconstructive criticism, undecidability is the end revealed by reading, whereas for Derrida undecidability is only the first movement in a necessarily double economy. The essay concludes with a discussion of Derrida's own inscription within the institutional debate over deconstruction.

While some recent gay scholarship attempts to appropriate a naturalized position within the patriarchal tradition that apparently excludes it, this essay aims to situate the gay within an expanded concept of maleness. The critical response to homophobia does not overcome the binary-opposition codes that form the basis of conventional sexual difference. Jean Cocteau's 1926 essay on transvestism, “Une leçon de théâtre: Le numéro Barbette,” shows those binary codes in operation as the female impersonator Barbette moves across gender boundaries only in a death-defying high-wire act. The Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno's 1988 performance piece Suiren ‘Water Lilies’ offers an alternative to the traditional sexual polarities asserted by Barbette's cross-dressing. Embodying “through-dressing” in a model of mutual inclusion, Ohno suggests the unconventional sexuality of a middle voice that preserves the ability of sensation or inner experience to fashion appearance.