The essays in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism explore rhetoric as a practical art of deliberation and judgment, best taught and learned through concrete examples of argument, interpretation, and criticism. Historically and in our own time scholars have shown that rhetoric can very well be theorized in the strong sense that specific principles can provide direction for inquiries into thought and persuasion. But this theorizing tends to remove itself from the indeterminacies of practical life and the conflicts of representation in texts and their contexts. Moreover, many forms of what is sometimes called ‘‘rhetorical criticism’’ treat interpretive issues without considering the ways texts engage with complex audiences (so well articulated by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz in their essays) or practical contemporary issues (exemplarily demonstrated in James Crosswhite’s essay), and without relating those matters to specific times and places (among others, for example, Thomas O. Sloane on Erasmus and Milton and Nancy S. Struever on Vico and Collingwood). And sometimes theorists and even critics of rhetoric undertake very abstract discussions in spite of the fact that rhetoric involves reasoning that is necessarily embedded in particular practical problems and situations. Even those well advanced in the study of rhetoric recognize that learning and mastering rhetoric requires engaging concrete texts in their specific, situated contexts. The various abilities of the good rhetorician – being able to invent terms, construct arguments, criticize faulty interpretations, and generally judge matters not susceptible to algorithmic rules – cannot be developed merely by being talked about; they must be actively undertaken in practice, by beginner and adept alike. A collection, therefore, in which concrete practice grounds and guides theorizing offers to initiates, as well as to advanced scholars, not only an account of what ‘‘rhetoric’’ is in the abstract, but also, more importantly, concrete experiences in rhetorical thinking across many of the disciplines in which it operates.
A Companion to Rhetoric offers the first major survey in two decades of the field of rhetorical studies and of the practice of rhetorical theory and criticism across a range of disciplines.
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Assesses rhetoric’s place in the larger intellectual universe.
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Focuses on the practical side of rhetoric, looking at specific works, problems and figures.
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Provides examples of rhetoric from ancient times to the present day.
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Written by leading scholars from a variety of different fields.