Notes on the Minneapolis Convention

 Notes on the Minneapolis Convention 

Status Report on Submissions:  We have now received evaluations from all reviewers and are in the process of computing and analyzing their reports.  With over 850 items to consider, this process takes some time, but we are moving ahead on schedule and should announce the results before Thanksgiving.  For those whose proposals are accepted, we will ask you to acknowledge your intention to attend the conference and to register by mid-February. 

Plenary Addresses: 

One of the highlights of convention will be the plenary addresses.  Three outstanding scholars will address us, and they are: 

SHARON CROWLEY, Professor Emerita from Arizona State University and a long-time member of RSA.  She is the author of several award winning books including The Methodical Memory (1990), Composition in the University (1998), and more recently, Toward a Civil Discourse (2006), which not only won the best book of the year prize from RSA, but also similar awards from the College Conference on Composition and Communication and the Journal of Advanced Communication.  In 2008, she was named a Fellow of RSA. 

Her talk is tentatively titled, "White Racism" and will consider how white supremacist ideology originated in the United States, how its rhetoric has eclipsed advances in civil rights, and how liberal commonplaces have been turned to the uses of white supremacy since the modern civil rights movement. 

LAURENT PERNOT, Professor and Chair of the Department of Greek at the University of Strasbourg, Director of the Centre d'Analyse des Rhetoriques Religieuses de l'Antiquite,  and immediate past President of International Society for the History of Rhetoric.  His many publications include La rhetorique de l'eloge dans le monde Greco-romain (1993), Eloges grec de Rome (1997), and La rhetorique dans l'antiquite, which has been translated into English by W.E. Higgins as Rhetoric in Antiquity (2005).  Pernot is Director of the series "Recherches sur les Rhetoriques religiuses" (Turnhout: Brepols), and Executive Editor of "International Studies in the History of Rhetoric" (Leiden-Boston, Brill). 

His talk is titled "The Two Enigmas of Epideictic Rhetoric" and will consider special problems connected with epideictic discourse in late antiquity and their relevance to interpretation of this problematic genre in later historical periods. 

JACK SELZER, Professor of English and Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at Penn State, is well known to all of us as our current president and as a leading authority on the works of Kenneth Burke.  He is author of Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931 (1997), and (with Ann George) co-author of Kenneth Burke in the 1930s (2007), and he has edited numerous books on composition and rhetoric.  Jack will speak at the Saturday luncheon on a topic connected with the Convention theme.