As critic, Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning purely esthetic and literary; but afterCounter-Statement(1931), he began to discriminate a ...

A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

In this provocative and forcefully written book, Steven Mailloux takes issue with the validity of a number of distinctions commonly made in contemporary literary theory and cultural studies--distinctions between theory and history, reader and text, truth and ideology, aesthetics and politics. Mailloux first presents the case for a rhetorical hermeneutics and against foundationalist theories of interpretation. Doing hermeneutic theory, he argues, entails doing rhetorical history. By means of a detailed analysis of reader-response criticism, he highlights the connections between institutional politics (...) and the interpretive rhetoric of academic literary criticism. Mailloux then uses Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an exemplary text. Relating Mark Twain's rhetoric to the cultural politics of post-Reconstruction debates about racist ideology, he places his reader-oriented interpretation within the rhetorical history of controversies over the meaning and value of Huckleberry Finn. Finally, in a far-ranging study of cultural reception, he juxtaposes the twentieth-century concern about the topic of race in Huckleberry Finn with the nineteenth-century audience's very different concerns about juvenile delinquency and the "bad-boy boom." In the final part of the book, Mailloux restates his critique of foundationalist hermeneutics through readings of Ken Kesey, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Richard Rorty, and he concludes by examining the role of rhetoric and theory in a congressional dispute over the Reagan administration's reinterpretation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Rhetorical Power will be welcomed by readers in literary theory and American studies, as well as in such fields as speech communication, the sociology of culture, and social and intellectual history, and by others interested in the politics of persuasion. (shrink)

Concluding with four philosophical essays, this volume of case studies demonstrates how the inventive and persuasive dimensions of scholarly discourse point the way to forms of argument appropriate to our postmodern age.

In this provocative book, Edward Schiappa argues that rhetorical theory did not originate with the Sophists in the fifth century B.C.E, as is commonly believed, but came into being a century later. Schiappa examines closely the terminology of the Sophists—such as Gorgias and Protagoras—and of their reporters and opponents—especially Plato and Aristotle—and contends that the terms and problems that make up what we think of as rhetorical theory had not yet formed in the era of the early Sophists. His revision (...) of rhetoric’s early history enables him to change the way we read both the Sophists and Aristotle and Plato. Schiappa contends, for example, that Plato probably coined the Greek word for rhetoric; that Gorgias is a “prose rhapsode” whose style does not deserve the criticism it has received; that Isocrates deliberately never uses the Greek work for "rhetoric" and that our habit of pitting him versus Plato as “rhetoric versus philosophy” is problematic; and that Aristotle "disciplined" the genre of epideictic in a way that robs the genre of its political importance. His book will be of great interest to students of classics, communications, philosophy, and rhetoric. (shrink)

Examines the nature of rhetorical theory and criticism, the rhetoric of science, and the impact of poststructuralism and postmodernism on contemporary accounts of rhetoric.

The author demonstrates how rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. He details what rhetorical hermeneutics means in terms of poststructuralist theory, nineteenth-century U.S. cultural studies, and the contemporary history of curricular reform within the so-called culture wars.