George Yoos was once kind enough to contribute paper to panel concerned partly with my use of the metaphor is wedge.1 Prior to that time, I had been using the metaphor only incidentally and in passing; most of the indexers of the books in which I had used it had missed it altogether. But the metaphor does encapsulate an aspect of rhetoric that I think is worth discussing in its own right. The speakers in the panel-not only Yoos, but also Carroll C. Arnold2-have already provided useful elaboration of this aspect. Here I shall discuss it further. Rhetoric, as I see it, is means-perhaps the only means-of evoking and maintaining consciousness. It accomplishes these ends by driving wedge between subject and object. For it is the instrument that objectifies stimuli or presuppositions not hitherto perceived as objects. An example of rhetoric at its most elementary level would be the question Isn't that your telephone ringing? addressed to person not hitherto conscious that his telephone was ringing. At more sophisticated level, if I have been unconsciously assuming that the death penalty is permissible punishment for some crimes, and you call that assumption into question, objectifying it as topic for discussion, you are engaging in rhetoric. In either case, you are evoking consciousness by introducing gap between subject and what can now objectively concern him. By a I simply mean whatever introduces such gap. Rhetoric has no place in transactions within systems in which there is no gap between the input of data and their acceptance. A good example is the continuity between the input of data to computer and its response to those data. The computer does not decide whether to accept the data. Of course software can be designed-and undoubtedly has been designed-providing message to the effect that certain data fed into the machine are inappropriate. But the mechanism that produces this result is merely an extension of the same mechanism through which the machine accepts other data. Consider the input ABXY. If this is acceptable, it is processed in certain way. If it is unacceptable, it is still received by the computer as input, and is processed in another way not different in principle from the first, although perhaps little more complex. The result of the second sort of processing is to produce the message ABXY is not acceptable. In neither situation, I would say, has there been use of rhetoric. For in neither case has the machine been made to stand over against its data-to take account of these data as objects. Even the machine's rejection of data fails to be an objectification of them. There was no wedge, and there is no gap. Rhetoric, as I conceive it, is the art of calling attention to situation for which objectivity is claimed. But I do not believe that any particular psychological

Years ago Loren Eiseley that life is most interesting on the margins. You never know what you'll find along the shore of the ocean or along the edge of a highway, or, to extend the notion into metaphor, on the peripheries of our minds or in transitional periods of history. Those of us in English departments who were working on modem rhetoric when it was new and not on literary history and criticism recognize the truth of the observation. The center of things tends to be, if not known, at least more familiar, constrained, and stable. But on the margin experience is more ambiguous and unpredictable, perhaps because it is there that different systems come together. Or perhaps because the people who work there are deliberately looking for change. Whatever the case, on the margin there are more possibilities, and change is easier. It is only on the margins, Eiseley says, that there is the possibility of Eiseley's metaphor for the new and unpredictable in the process of biological evolution. have dragons, he says, one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore. Otherwise everything becomes stale, commonplace, and observed (28). Recently at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Janet Emig, Janice Lauer, and I presented papers on a panel entitled Reconsidering the Discipline: Three Perspectives on the History and Present Situation of Rhetoric and Composition. The title captures well the thrust of Janet Atwill's proposal for the panel; she had asked us to provide eyewitness accounts of the development of the New Rhetoric, at least the New Rhetoric as it was emerging in departments of English, and also do something a good deal more risky, i.e., to characterize the present state of the discipline.l As I worked on my paper, a precursor of this one, I found myself coming back again and again to how much of my own career has been on the margin of English studies. It's still true to some extent today, but at that time to work in the field of rhetoric was to really be on the margin. I doubt if any of us wanted to be marginalized in the profession; but those of us who didn't already know the score soon learned from their better adapted colleagues that rhetoric was a doubtful discipline that belonged, if anywhere, in speech departments, and that composition was not a proper academic discipline at all but merely a service that English departments performed, often with reluctance, for the rest of the academic community. Unless we also had a more respectable intellectual interest on which we could base our reputations, we were on the margin of the margin. To many of our colleagues we were beyond the fringe. I remember that I began looking into rhetoric in the late fifties and early sixties as the result of reading and being puzzled by C.S. Lewis's well-known comment that what separates the modern scholar most from the study of the Renaissance is his ignorance of classical rhetoric. At the same time, caught up in

When Edward P. J. Corbett was editor of College Composition and Communication, his fairly rigid standards for article length undoubtedly had the effect of forcing some loose thinking to a fairly sharp point. It also had the effect of pushing some discussions into an awesome degree of compression that made them less available to casual readers than they might have been otherwise. On the other hand, they offer a rewarding read now, if one is willing to commit the mental energy to put them together with the world. To my mind, a classic illustration of this sort of essay is George Yoos' An Identity of Roles in Writing and Reading from the fall, 1979 issue. In that paper, Yoos provided a model for reading and writing processes that finds reciprocity between writing and reading strategies at four different levels-at the level of objective expression or of content, at the level of face-adjustment or ethical appeal, at the level of audience, and at the level of logic or truth. Under this system, both writer and reader perform in roles defined by these four topics, and if one is generally accentuated in any specific situation, it is pretty clear that accommodation or sensitivity to all roles can provide a highly enriched perspective on writing. However, any conceptualizing like this, anchored in Collingwood, Croce, and George Herbert Meade (the names cited here) is probably going to seem rather alien and have some apparently rough points for present day readers. One of these is Yoos' flat assumption-deriving from Collingwood and Croce-that Kinneavy's effort to see expression as a mode of communication is wrong, and that the need to keep expression separate from communication is basic to an understanding of the writing process. Our present pedagogical tendency of using personal expression as a way to develop fluency and authenticity will tend to make readers unreceptive to the basic truth that writing will always be writing, that is, texts in which expression can be found, but which should never be confused with expression. To ignore this fact is to run a far graver risk of creating writing anxiety than would be possible by framing writing as an impersonal formalistic game. Another rough point would have to be Yoos' notion of the faceadjustment role, which he identifies with ethical appeal as a matter of clear about what one is doing. Yoos draws a clear distinction between this and the audience role which involves a strategic awareness and management of how different audiences will react, and, from the reading point of view, a reader's awareness of how these audiences are being managed. These are very subtle distinctions that take us quite a way back to a classical view of rhetorical operations (pace Knoblauch and Brannon). More generally, Yoos makes it clear that the relation between writing and reading is much deeper than writing scholars tend to acknowledge, in spite of the years of research into reading and writing connections. Certainly the kind of mirror-imaging that his essay provides-in which, say, an objective-expressive is one the writer plays by getting what he or she knows down into words, and that the reader reads for to see what the writer really knows, as a ground to be comprehended before processing rhetorical and logical acts-involves a complex conceptualizing of the communication process that promises a very rich critical

But can we bring ourselves to realize . . . just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by 'reality' has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so 'down to earth' as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our 'reality' for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? In school, as they go from class to class, students turn from one idiom to another. . . And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall 'picture' is but a construct of our symbol systems.

Accordingly when Aristotle observed that Isocrates succeeded in obtaining a distinguished set of pupils by abandoning legal and political subjects and devoting his discourses to empty elegance of style, he himself suddenly altered almost the whole of his own system of training, and quoted a line from Philoctetes with a slight modification: the hero in the tragedy said that it was a disgrace for him to keep silent and barbarians to speak, but Aristotle put in suffer Isocrates to speak; and consequently he put the whole of his system in a polished and brilliant form, and linked the scientific study of facts with practice in style (Cicero, 1942, III.139; see also Philodemus, 1920, p. 329; or Quintilian 1920, III.i.14).

(1990). Positional historiography and Margaret Fuller's public discourse of mutual interpretation. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 233-239.

(1990). The formation of college English: A survey of the archives of eighteenth‐century rhetorical theory and practice. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 261-286.

(1990). Nineteenth‐century rhetoric at the universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews with an annotated bibliography of Archiveal materials. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 287-299.

Conley, Thomas M., Rhetoric in the European Tradition, New York: Longman, 1990. 325 pp. Sonja K. Foss, Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration & Practice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989. Pp. v + 420.

(1990). How the other half sounds: An historical survey of musical rhetoric during the baroque and after. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 207-224.

(1990). A sense of place, a spirit of adventure: Implications for the study of regional rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 225-232.

The crossing of poetry and oratory developed naturally for Philip Sidney, as it did for Aristotle (Murrin 8). Because of Sidney's classical education at Shrewsbury, his years at Christ Church College in Oxford, and his exposure to continental philosophy during his European travels, his poetry and prose embody a unique interpretation of classical Greek philosophy and oratory. In fact, J. E. Spingarn states:

Persuasive discourse, either as a separate mode of discourse (Kinneavy 1971) or as a distinctive part of argumentative discourse,2 frequendy remains part of the overall writing assignment for our composition students. Although we may disagree as to how to define exactly or teach persuasive discourse in writing classrooms, we have more or less followed the tradition of Western classical rhetoric with respect to our basic understanding of it--although few of us would now restrict ourselves only to discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion (Aristotle 1960: 7). For example, we teach our students different sub-types of persuasive discourse and ask them to apply ethical, emotional (pathetic) and logical proofs to their own persuasive essays; we select political speeches, polemic essays or modern advertising materials as prime examples of how different persuasive strategies and techniques can be most effectively invoked to achieve their respective objectives of winning. To varying degrees, many composition text books have adopted, and thus perpetuated this normal way of doing things with persuasive discourse.3 In so doing, however, we have--perhaps unknowingly--imparted to our students two problematic notions, which underlie much of what has been believed to be persuasive discourse. The first assumes that persuasive discourse is grounded in or predicated on conflict or confrontation, which it aims to overcome or eradicate. The second perceives audience as both external4 and oppositional, whom persuasive discourse is intended to transform or convert. It is these two notions and their probable consequences that I will discuss first in this essay. Following this discussion, I will draw upon, respectively, Grice's cooperative model of conversation (1975; 1989) and Burke's concept of (1962) to propose a new heuristic model5 of persuasive discourse, one that takes cooperation through identification as a core constituent and provides a dynamic setting that is conducive to rhetorical diversities. Finally, I will consider some potentials of this new model in our writing classrooms.

In ancient Greece, a was, literally, a leader of the people. The meaning of the term has changed considerably since then, however, and a today is regarded as someone who appeals to greed, fear, and hatred (Safire 163), a politician who achieves or holds power stirring up the feelings of his audience and leading them [sic] to action despite the considerations which weigh against (Scruton 115). If demagogue is a modem day devil term, then its usage will be accompanied by the degree of subjectivity which is a hallmark of such words and phrases in modern society. In short, the label demagogue is often used as a weapon by one group to another (Clark 423). This is especially true in American politics, where the term has been used as an attack word as far back as 1808 (Safire 163). This subjectivity may help to explain the wide variety of persons who have been, at one time or another, labeled as demagogues. Some members of this less-than-elite group are obvious and noncontroversial candidates: Senator Joseph McCarthy (Fisher; Luthin; Baskerville), Huey Long (Gaske; Luthin; Bormann; although exception to this label for Long is taken by Williams), George Wallace (Johannesen), Adolf Hitler (Blackbourn; Fishman), Louis Farrakhan (Rosenblatt), and such well-known Nineteenth Century figures as Kearney (Lomas, Dennis Kearney), Pitchfork Ben Tillman (Clark), and William Jennings Bryant (Tulis). Other public figures who have been nominated for the list are more obscure, including Ma and Pa Ferguson (Luthin; Herman), Gerald K. Smith (Sitton), and Henry Harmon Spalding (Thompson), while others would seem, at first glance, to be unlikely candidates: Jimmy Carter (Will), Jesse Jackson (Drew), Andrew Johnson (Tulis), and Senator Joseph Biden (Barnes). In attempting to understand what is nominally called demagoguery, however, two important distinctions should be made. The first involves demagoguery and rhetoric. Although demagogues use rhetoric (as noted above), and although demagogic rhetoric has certain identifiable characteristics (as will be discussed below), it does not necessarily follow that a speaker who uses demagogic rhetoric on a particular occasion is thus properly to be considered a demagogue. As Luthin notes, there exists a bit of demagoguery in the most lofty of statesmen. . (355). Thus, a would be correctly defined as one who habitually uses the hallmarks of demagoguery to be discussed later in this review of literature. A second important distinction should be made, this one concerning the difference between what is nominally called demagoguery and nominally called agitation. The distinction has often been blurred in practice; for many, all agitators are demagogues, and vice versa (Lomas, The Agitator 18). Put simply, an agitator is someone who seeks to effect social change through rhetoric. The term often has a negative connotation because the status quo is usually resistant to change and thus wary of those who urge it (McEdwards 36). Although the agitator may resort to demagoguery, agitative rhetoric is not, in itself, demagogic (Lomas, The Agitator 19).

In last twenty-five years, field interpersonal communication has expanded tenaciously, establishing connections with disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and even literary studies.l Although this rapid expansion indicates current strength and vigor field, it also indicative a veritable identity crisis. Suggests Arthur P. Bochner, Interpersonal communication is a vague, fragmented, and loosely-defined subject that intersects all behavioral, social, and cultural sciences. There are no rigorous definitions that limit scope field, no texts that comprehensively state its foundations, and little agreement among its practitioners about which frameworks or methods offer most promise for unifying field. (1985, 27) There is nothing inherently wrong with vagueness, fragmentation, or loose definitions, course; Renaissance Humanism was built on such a foundation. What is unsettling about interpersonal communication's crisis character, though, is reticence exhibited by field's theorists to explore connections with distant past. Perusing footnotes, indexes, and bibliographies contemporary interpersonal communication research and pedagogy, one works back only as far as relatively recent [social scientists and other] figures such as Martin Buber, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Eric Fromm, R. D. Laing, and Eric Berne. This suspiciously brief official history is verified in Handbook Interpersonal Communication, in which Mark Knapp and Gerald Miller assert that concerted interest in study interpersonal communication processes and outcomes is relatively recent origin, and that the study interpersonal communication did not commence to bloom profusely until 1960's (8). Knapp and Miller's suggestion that the study interpersonal communication has thus far progressed only from infancy to adolescence (1 1) further supports widespread belief that discipline is extremely young. The central argument this essay-that scholars interpersonal communication, in an effort to define their discipline in modern terms, have mistakenly cut themselves off from their true roots and from much liberal-arts tradition-is built upon three principal contentions. First, interpersonal communication is not of relatively recent origin, but is, in fact, an ancient study, dating back at least as far as Plato. Second, interpersonal communication grew out a healthful, invigorating competition with ancient rhetorical theory and practice. In order to understand claims, power, and limitations one, we must have an appreciation for, or at least an understanding of, other. Third, interpersonal communication specialists, both in their research and in classroom, should highlight their field's long and enlightening battle with

Contemporary scholarship in rhetoric has recognized Ralph Waldo Emerson's interests in rhetorical theory. James A. Berlin, for example, who identifies Emerson's romantic rhetoric, in opposition to the rhetoric of the late eighteenth century, as a precursor of several modem tendencies, deals adequately with Emerson in his survey of nineteenth-century American writing instruction (42-57). Berlin's treatment of Emerson will be assumed here, qualified by Judy F. Parham's point that the tension between private and public in Emerson is a productive one (80). However, although he implies that Henry David Thoreau's position does not differ significantly from Emerson's, Berlin does not treat Thoreau's theoretical statements separately. Similarly, although dozens of literary scholars have investigated Thoreau's rhetorical practices, to my knowledge no analysis has been done on his rhetorical theory.l My intention is to show that Thoreau presents a theoretical version of eloquence distinct from Emerson's. Although this presentation is by no means unified in terms of a quintessential reduction, a consistent version does emerge across various works and personas, one fundamentally incompatible as well with the psychological rhetoric Thoreau studied in Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric and the opinions of Harvard's Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Edward T. Channing. Thoreau's thoughts on eloquence, I suggest, should be aligned with a much different tradition in order to highlight their unique character.

As I enter my last year of my editorship of the Quarterly, a sense of sadness is setting in, both about my declining energies and about the ending of my love affair with the Quarterly. But all good things just cannot go on forever. It is a little late now to be expressing some of the following sentiments, but still they might prove useful to some readers. As a statement of farewell my sentiments hopefully may place in perspective what the Quarterly has been all about. These rather unscholarly sentiments have guided my nickle and dime makeshift efforts to put together the Quarterly year after year. It is probably best that I have kept some of these sentiments to myself up until now, much like Harry Truman's final negative sentiments about the Missouri Waltz. But, let me out with them, for they say much about the form and shape the Quarterly has taken over the years. As comments they will be valedictory rather than advice for rhetoricians to come. I do not want to impose upon my successors the burden of my errors. I don't think that I need tell many members of the Rhetoric Society that around some academic colleagues to fly the flag of is to invite not only scorn but contempt. With some it is to put professional careers at hostage and to place the direction of our research and scholarship in the hands of people who are making judgments where of they know not what they judge. If we wish to develop and expand programs under the label of rhetoric, it has, at least been my experience, to have to engage in endless explanations to colleagues about what it is we are doing in the name of rhetoric, why it is important, and above all that it is academically respectable. Certainly our claims need defending, but to have to continuously defend tries patience. By now we should, one would think, as skilled rhetoricians have convinced our opposition in academia of our eminent respectability. But we have not. I recall how on one occasion, when I was asked to justify the inclusion of philosophy, not rhetoric, in the general education program in my school, that I impatiently challenged that the burden of proof was on any one who wanted to eliminate it. Similarly, if the burden of proof were to be shifted to our opposition, I suggest, maybe they would have to take the time to know a little more about what they discount. But alas, to try to advance professionally under the flag of rhetoric, despite our convictions of its importance, is to go against the reversals of history, the Ramus decay, and the eventual complete collapse of as an academic discipline in the 19th century. It is most of all to have to struggle against the present day pejorative use of the term rhetoric. The common usage of the term rhetoric defines us. Rhetoric is merely mere. It is the common expletive for saying that what you say says nothing. Still, despite these simplistic dismissals of rhetoric, I fly my flag of knowing that my judgment about its overwhelming value to human history is correct. But the image of flags waving does, I admit, give me pause, for I have in my associative memory another image of a flag, a flag that cautions me about loyalty to any dead cause. It is the image of the Confederate flag. Has my loyalty to been very much different in kind from that of the South's nostalgic loyalty to that lost cause of all lost causes the Southern Confederacy?

(1990). Rhetorical contexts and hedges. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 49-59.

From 1887 to 1904, Science and The Popular Science Monthly published a series of articles on the characteristics of composition, articles pointed out an uneasy alliance between scientific methodology and traditional rhetorical assumptions about the nature of writing. This turn-of-the-century dispute between Robert Moritz and Thomas Mendenhall shows how early researchers in rhetoric cast their inquiries in scientific terms to gain the legitimacy of scientific findings. Further, the little-known debate can be read as a precursor to the many debates followed over whether and how quantitative methods can resolve questions in rhetorical inquiry, and more fundamentally, what vision of language underwrites the assumptions of such methods. The debate I want to focus on began with Mendenhall, who first argued for his version of composition analysis in the March 1887 issue of Science.' In this article, as well as in his papers of 1901 and 1904, he seeks to prove his hypothesis (based on a remark by Augustus DeMorgan) each author has a of composition. The curve is based on the frequency with which an author uses words of different lengths, is, one-letter words, two-letter words, and so on. The number of words of each length, when tabulated and graphed, shows the characteristic curve of author. Mendenhall was a noted nineteenth century scientist who published in a wide variety of areas, including geology, geography and science education. He was a president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute and served for a time as an editor of Science. Thus a scientific approach to composition was for him merely an extension of methods he used in his daily work. Indeed, he originated his theory based on an analogy to spectral analysis, a method of determining the elements of a given physical substance. Just as each element gives forth a group of waves of definite length, and appearing in certain definite proportions (Mendenhall 1887, 238), so each person's style is marked by numerical constants--the frequency of words of each length. This analogy with spectral analysis reveals not only Mendenhall's procedure but also his notion of the inevitability of style. The style of people, like of elements, is determined by their nature and not their mode of existence; is, their texts are determined by inevitable displays of their fixed personality and not their rhetorical choices. The merits of this approach, according to Mendenhall, are that it offers a means of investigating and displaying the mere mechanism of composition, and it is purely mechanical in its application. (Mendenhall 1887, 245). Mechanism makes impossible human failings of choice and error: by focusing on a meaningless aspect of composition, the researcher can avoid the effects of deliberate changes by the author; by using a mechanistic data gathering method,

Socrates, of course, does not mean to venerate the art of discourse here. He is telling Phaedrus that there is discourse and there is truth. Once you have gone out and dug up the truth somewhere else, you apply the art of discourse to it and fashion a persuasive argument that will permit others to partake also of the truth. Two immediate implications follow from Socrates' position. First, only when the art of discourse, rhetoric, is put to the task of selling truth to the benighted does it become real. Second, rhetoric is necessary human affairs just to the extent that humans are unable to apprehend truth directly. It is an unfortunate evil, required because we are rationally degenerate creatures. Both positions have remained very popular over the intervening two millenia. Bitzer, for instance, can still say that in the best of all possible worlds there would be communication perhaps, but not rhetoric;'I we get our truth and knowledge somewhere else, and only our lack of perfection prevents us from casting rhetoric out of the garden. But there is an important lesson those two millenia that can help us to see the Spartan's words another light: the sources of truth which rhetoric has been obliged to serve have changed dramatically-from Socrates' dialectic and Aristotle's apodeixis, to Christianity's biblical exegesis and divine revelation, to the current authority on matters of knowledge and truth, Science. This rotation of leading roles while the supporting actress, Lady Rhetoric, remains constant indicates that the real art of discourse is connected with truth not because of human degeneracy, but because of precisely the reverse, because of our spark of perfection, because we are truth-seeking, knowledge-making creatures who sometimes get it right. We occasionally do something important with rhetoric: we find truth and we build knowledge out of it. When we manage the trick, though, we are so eager to dissociate it from all the foul and inane things we also do with rhetoric that we give the process another name. But these other names are clearly just aliases for rhetoric, or for some subset of rhetorical interests. Dialectic, for instance, is essentially questing debate. Apodeixis is distinguished only by the level of rigor Aristotle demands of the argumentation, not by any qualitative difference. Exegesis is rhetorical analysis. The only possible gap to this pattern is divine revelation, whose capacity to generate truth I will leave to more knowledgeable commentators, pausing only to notice that, true or not, reports of revelation usually involve a fair amount of persuasive machinery-burning bushes, hovering spirits, and the like. In any case, science is certainly no exception.

Richard has, of course, been a part of the contemporary philosophical and rhetorical scene for some time now. As, in fact, someone whose views I oppose pointed out to me recently: Rorty has been around long enough now to be attacked by any number of people for his naive view of the nature of discussion, that is, the nature of rhetoric. This same person also subsequently informed me that even (blank) [a well-known literary and rhetorical theorist whom he judged a particularly keen thinker] has moved Rorty. Needless to say, this essay is not at all about Rorty's so-called naivete (although I shall return to my colleague in the conclusion), nor is it about moving beyond anyone. It is, instead, about the usefulness of both Rortian attitudes toward philosophy and a Rormian perspective on the history of Western theories of knowledge, in illuminating the exceptional position in which rhetoric finds itself today. It is an essay about joining or, perhaps, his having already joined us, rather than about passing him--joining him, as Michael Oakeshott would have it (and as, in fact, cited by in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in a passage which appears later in this essay), not in a universitas, a group united by mutual interests but rather in a societas, persons whose paths through life have fallen together united by civility rather than a common goal (318). That I might illustrate that this is not only a sensible but also a profitable course of action, I will in the pages following first give a brief overview of Rorty's life and published works (at least as they bear upon the possibilities of Rorty-asrhetorician or, better still, Rorty-as-harbinger-of-rhetoric), then outline what I take to be the main thrust of his work (what some would call his activity as a historian of ideas), then relate this thrust to present-day philosophy (as sees it growing and changing in the light of our awareness of that history--a central Rortian point: it is the historical-philosophical frame which gives both clarity and coherence to any explanation of where, intellectually, we have been or might go), and--finally--speak to what I at least find to be Rorty's considerable and enduring importance to the contemporary rhetorical scene. In doing the above, I may well offer more detail than is really needed by some already well-versed in Rorty's work. If this is the case, I ask the indulgence of these readers--in order that I might have the opportunity to address, and attempt to persuade, those who lack such a familiarity. First, life and works.

Tullio Maranhao, Therapeutic Discourse and Socratic Dialogue. University of Wisconsin Series in Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans, eds. with John W. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll. Woodbridge, Connecticut: Ox Bow Press, 1989. Rpt. Princeton University Press, 1966. 450 pp. Stephen M. North. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987. 403.

building on some common ground with the audience. Aristotle's concept of the enthymeme as a fundamental source of persuasion requires the audience to grant or accept the premises of the rhetor. Aristotle says that a speaker should start from opinions accepted by our judges or by those whose authority they recognize (1395b). Similarly, for Kenneth Burke the key term in rhetoric is identification, which is established between a persuader and an audience by finding some substance or underlying ground in common (consubstantiality) (I 969, 19-23). But what if there is little or nothing in common between a speaker and an audience? What if the audience does not accept the value system of the speaker? How could a speaker proceed in such an extreme case? As Wayne Booth explains, classical rhetoric offers little help, for it assumes

(1989). (Un)creating taste: Wordsworth's Platonic defense in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 333-347.

(1989). Making meaning in literate conversations: A teachable sequence for reflective writing. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 229-243.

The metaphor has gained much importance as of late. No longer simply a decorative feature of discourse, the trope has obtained an epistemological and ontological dimension. No longer merely a figural flourish of prose, the metaphor has acquired an important role in the study of human understanding. Hence, thanks to theoretical rehabilitation and philosophical reconsideration, metaphorical analysis has become an important and popular pursuit for many disciplines--philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, rhetoric, et al.2 While the insights generated and the discoveries made by metaphorical analysis are significant and worthy of much study, we will take as our point of departure the limits of such critical inquiry. This essay offers another perspective, a sort of theoretical intervention which examines from another angle the study of discourse. Rhetorical theory, it will be reasoned, benefits from a perspective which considers the metonymical features of discourse. As such, the comparative advantages of either metaphorical or metonymical analysis are not measured by which one is true, but rather by which one is most useful for a given project. Simply put, a metonymical perspective can recognize and explain a terrain outside the scope of metaphorical analysis. The change we consider in this essay does not render useless or inadequate previous explanations, but rather opens a space or a zone from which to critically evaluate what has been previously overlooked. As noted, the popularity and importance of the metaphor has never been greater. Whether it be conceived as function, cluster, or nature, the research has sought, and continues to seek, the habitation of the metaphor within all symbolic discourse. Indeed, it may be safe to assume that the study of metaphors remains an important and integral component of contemporary rhetorical theory. As a result of theoretician diligence and persistence, a wide array of techniques exist for the study of metaphors within discourse. For examples of such metaphorical research we turn briefly to the work of I.A. Richards, Max Black, Edwin Black, and Paul Ricoeur. Perhaps no one should figure more prominently than I.A. Richards in the reappraisal of the trope. Using the metaphor, his New Rhetoric, seeks to recover meaning, to stabilize and neutralize the somewhat figural moments of discourse.

Tantalizing and provocative questions about classical systems of topical invention continue to receive well-deserved scholarly attention. Recently, Corbett, explored how the topics can inform the teaching of writing and Trimpi2 analyzed the possible connections between the topics and literary theory. Whether or not the topics divide themselves into material and formal received differing answers from Conley3 and Grimaldi.4 Moreover, investigations to discover how the tradition of topics shifted and changed across time has been addressed by Stump,5 Cogan,6 and Leff.7 The intellectual richness of such studies stems from many sources. Aristotle, for example, authors a topical system for dialectic and another, somewhat similar somewhat dissimilar, for the art of rhetoric. Cicero, in his early work offered a topical system based on persons and actions for rhetorical practice. Later, in his Topica something resembling Aristotle's dialectical method appears and then, even more problematic, in his later treatises a topical system uniting rhetoric and philosophy emerges, but in a truncated, fragmented form. As Buckley noted:

Robert de Beaugrande, Critical Discourse: A Survey of Literary Theorists. Norwood: New Jersey, 1988. 472 pp. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing: De construction, Composition and Influence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 256 pp. Chris M. Anson, ed. Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1989. 371 pp. John T. Harwood, ed. The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Gerald Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry. Edited with an introduction by Peter Burian. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xx + 221 pp. Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 207 pp.

The five canons, parts, faculties, or functions of rhetoric are among the most constant features in the systematic treatment of the art (Scaglione 14). In many respects, they constitute the basic pattern of all theoretical and critical investigations into rhetorical art and practice (Thonssen 86). The five--invention (content, discovery), disposition (arrangement, organization), style (diction, elocution), memory, and delivery (presentation)--were canonized in Latin rhetoric as inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio or actio. They were important in Greek rhetoric as heurisis, taxis, lexis, mneme, and hypocrisis. While the exact origin of the canons is unknown, the five recur in rhetorical theory from antiquity to the present, where they command attention individually and collectively. Studying rhetoric, most agree, requires studying its canons. They are the sub-disciplines of the main, the lesser arts of the greater (Connors 64). They allow separate analysis and study of a complete five-part system (Murphy 83). They are the aspects of composing which work together in a recursive, synergistic, mutually dependent relationship (Welch Paradox 5-6). In part, the very history of rhetoric consists in changing relationships and interrelationships between them (Mahony 14). The canons apply to both encoding and decoding, forming a complete system for both generating and analyzing discourse (Welch Ideology 270). They represent not only the concepts with which the rhetor must deal and which he must master, but also the aspects of the rhetorical act which the critic examines and evaluates (Thonssen 86). In speech studies, minor changes in the meanings of the five terms have been developed in various treatises, but the pattern remains the same (Thonssen 86). In composition studies, the five canons are one of two prmary theories which dominate the discipline (Welch Ideology 269). The structure which has dominated both disciplines' textbooks, however, is a truncated one. Rarely has the five-part scheme been presented completely and explicitly. In speech studies, the fourth canon--memory--has virtually been dropped and usually receives incidental treatment (Thonssen 87). In composition studies, the first three canons--invention, arrangement, style--organize the vast majority of current textbooks, but the last two--memory and delivery--are typically deleted without a word of explanation (Welch Paradox 5, Ideology 270). This deletion, when explained, has been attributed to changed conditions in the law courts (Kennedy 105), to memory's absorption under disposition (Kennedy 210; Mahony 14) and, most often, to the western world's shift from orality to literacy. The tendency has been for modern rhetorical theory to abandon, remove, neglect, limit, or misunderstand both memory and delivery. On the other hand,

As Otto A. L. Dieter argues in his landmark essay, (1959), Greek concepts of motion provided classical rhetoricians with a theoretical framework for analyzing and conducting rational argument.' The various ways in which motion can be considered contrary, the different grounds on which contrary motions come to rest, the array of faults impeding contrary motions--all these distinctions, borrowed from the philosophic study of kinesis (movements) and metabolai (changes in Being), were applied by rhetoricians to describe and facilitate amphisbetesis, or the moving apart of opposing assertions. Stasis theory, then, provided a paradigm essential to the two phases of the rhetorical process: Noesis (Cogitation) and Poiesis (Production). This paradigm allowed the rhetorician to reflect upon--and upon reflection, to judge--whether a conflict of wills and a contest of assertions truly existed, and therefore, whether the matter under dispute was properly rhetorical. Likewise, the paradigm allowed him to anticipate the question to be resolved, the strategies of accusation or defense most likely to be adopted by the opponent, and consequently, the posture or strategy best suited to winning the dispute. If it is true that theories of classical rhetoric have survived because of their utility, then stasis theory has proven indispensable: for over 2000 years it has survived within the canon of rhetorical theory.2 Its most recent incarnation has taken place during the past four decades. Motivated first by historical interest, rhetorical scholars are now reconstituting stasis theory for much the same reason that prompted its formalization in the second century B.C.: the need to find an overarching paradigm that shapes the vast array of distinctions belonging to rhetorical theory into a practical system, one capable of identifying and resolving current communication problems.3

DI-fusion, le Dépôt institutionnel numérique de l'ULB, est l'outil de référencementde la production scientifique de l'ULB.L'interface de recherche DI-fusion permet de consulter les publications des chercheurs de l'ULB et les thèses qui y ont été défendues.

(1989). Argumentation in Chomsky's syntactic structures an exercise in rhetoric of science. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 105-130.

Dan Sperber/Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1986, 254 pp.1 Alan C. Purves, ed. Writing Across Languages and Cultures: Issues in Contrastive Rhetoric, Written Communication Annual: An International Survey of Research and Theory, vol. 2. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Pp. xvii + 508.

(1989). Paradeigma: The problems of human acting and the use of examples in some Greek authors of the 4th century B.C. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 141-152.

Of all the bruising confrontations between the capitalist and communist power blocks perhaps none was so staggering as the Cuban missile crisis. Most Americans patriotically rallied around our determined young president in this great moment of crisis, but there were other Americans who spoke with a different voice then who presumed to disagree with the dominant opinion. These were the voices from the left, now the old left. Their rhetorical response is my subject. By concentrating on several specimens written from a leftist perspective in response to a single event, I create a framework for analyzing the discourse of an ideology to demonstrate the influence of that ideology on and argument, together with the usefulnesses of an analytic method. Antecedent to this analysis are particular considerations about style, argument and method which lead to other considerations peculiar to the relation of political discourse to the world. Because the event focused opinion strongly, and time gives perspective, I have chosen written and oral reactions to the Cuban missile crisis. In addition to selections of written from three leftist newspapers, the National Guardian, The Weekly People, and The Catholic Worker, I have included speech samples on the same topic from Dean Rusk, then Secretary of State, as a contrast to the rhetoric of the left. To analyze this discourse I use Walker Gibson's style machine as he calls it developed to account for distinctions...in the voices addressing (115), distinctions which he breaks down into tough, sweet and stuffy talkers. Gibson's machine, consisting of sixteen grammatical-rhetorical qualities, is appended (A). Other available descriptions or classifications of or argument are Huntington Brown's deliberative, expository and prophetic, Edwin Black's exhortation and argument, and Aristotle's topics. Brown and Black analyze thought methodology with some consideration of style. The neo-Aristotelians, on the other hand, consider and thought combined into argumentative methods. I follow the classical topics in considering rhetorical argument (Rhetoric chs. 22, 23, 24; Corbett 94-132). My particular assumptions are that belief influences style, that while prose styles can be typed individual differences remain, that includes varieties of diction, syntax, and argument Further, I seek an attitude towards language, an attitude, however, influenced not by cultural or individual psychology, but by political belief. Because political writers argue, their arguments common to all rhetoric can also be typed. Argument creates patterns which shapes. For Gibson is a matter of sheer individual will, a desire for a particular kind of self-definition no matter what the circumstances (24). Political belief can condition will. For both Marie H. Nichols (75), and Edwin Black (Persona) reveals distinctive political personalities. In selecting a usable analytical methodology I had either to invent my own, or use an existing one. I chose Gibson's because we share similar concerns. I want to know what kind of voice speaks. What does the use of that voice imply? How do I determine trust? I also want to know the attitude of that voice towards subject and audience. If Gibson can help to answer these questions, then I accept his work saving the necessity of inventing yet another method, concentrating instead on the results produced. In general, stylistics seems more of a discourse on method than on results. Although we want to know what ails us, naming is not enough. To know that Dorothy Day talks tough does not suffice. We know there are other names than tough, sweet or stuffy. The point is not just to label, but to penetrate into the thought behind the voice aided by a given point of view. Gibson describes his work as primitive. Primitive, yet legitimate because applied he yields insight His method reveals attitude just as psychiatric categories, which might also be called primitive, reveal motive. If the arguments which pattern are traditional and discernible, their correlations with are not as clear. The advertiser, for example, speaks sweetly with recognizably dubious argument. Those political voices purring and storming at us must also be judged by how they argue so their trustworthiness can be determined. We can uncover falsehood by showing how a statement varies from reality--plain lying. We can discover understanding of mental illness by probing the discordance the aberrant mind creates

(1989). Voice merging and self‐making: The epistemology of “I have a dream”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 23-31.

Chapman/Tate descriptive survey of 38 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition has given us valuable information about these programs, which, for the most part, have sprung up only within the last ten years. survey, published in the Spring 1987 Review (124-86), revealed our programs' deep structure; it also has raised some questions about the definition, development and direction of our doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition. Few of the 38 programs that sent written materials for the survey listed classical rhetoric as core requirement, and almost half listed no history of rhetoric courses. However, 35 of the 38 programs listed theories of composition course. Because the availability of, as well as the teaching approach to, classical rhetoric can show the foundations on which our programs are built and the theoretical directions they may be taking, I prepared questionnaire on the classical rhetoric course offered in English departments, mailed it to 41 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition, and eventually received 37 completed questionnaires. survey results not only reveal some foundations and direction of our programs in rhetoric and composition but also point out areas for further study. Does the program offer course in classical rhetoric and, if so, is the course part of the core requirement were two of the primary survey questions. Twenty-eight out of the 37 programs (76%) that sent written materials reported they offer course either in classical rhetoric or wherein substantial part is devoted to classical Eight (23%) do not offer the course, but in six of these eight the course is offered in Speech Communication. Two programs reported that the course is listed but not taught. And two programs reported the course is not offered at all. Four programs reported that the course offered in the English Department is also offered in Speech Communication. 76 percent of programs offering the course differ from the Chapman/Tate percentages because some of the 28 programs defined theirs as course in classical rhetoric where only one-third, about five weeks, or less, is devoted to classical These courses are, in the words of one respondent, a rush through rhetoric. Some courses, titled Rhetoric and (or Composition and Rhetoric), are actually topic courses that can take any focus. In one program it depends on who teaches the course whether it is history of rhetoric or the teaching of composition. Course names are quite varied. Only six are called History of Rhetoric, and two are named History and Theories. (The naming of one course title, survey respondent told me, has long and hilarious story. In 1976 the course had been The of Rhetoric, but that's the title of Richards' book, so the title was changed to Philosophy of Composition, which became the title of Hirsch's book, so the program changed it to its present title, The Rhetorical Tradition and the Teaching of Composition, at which point Knoblauch and Brannon appeared.) Other course titles are Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern Discourse, Major Rhetorical Texts, Historical Studies, Rhetoric of Written Discourse. I was somewhat surprised that more of the course names didn't have the word written in the title to distinguish the course from the one offered in Speech for the last 75 years. Perhaps crossing departmental lines in the teaching of rhetoric is not the problem it was in the 70's. This subject itself would make an interesting study. classical rhetoric course is core requirement in 50 percent of the programs in contrast to the 91 percent of programs requiring composition theory. (In one program classical rhetoric is required, but it's offered only in Speech Communication.) These percentages suggest that we cannot assume the study of classical rhetoric as foundational for composition studies in our doctoral programs. In fact, it is possible for student to have Ph.D. specialty in rhetoric and composition without having had course in classical question here for further study is, then, how are we to define the rhetoric/composition speialist? next series of survey questions I asked focused on the frequency of the course offering, length of time it has been offered in the program, qualifications of the faculty who teach it, average enrollment and area of stuident specialty. In the majority of programs, the course is offered every other year and has been offered only within the last ten years. Usually, only one person teaches the course, faculty

Allan Bloom's controversial book The Closing of American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished Souls of Today's Students2 has attracted popular attention to a position that already had been gaining currency among critics of American higher education. These critics charge that we educators are failing our students individually and our community collectively by failing to teach morality--by failing to attend to role our disciplines play for students and practitioners in formation of their character. But questions as complicated and momentous as whether education in a discipline should aim to develop moral character, how it should do so, and how it can do so without damaging spirit and skills of free inquiry are hardly such simple questions as they are often depicted, including by Bloom. This is especially true for a discipline so frequently accused of complicity with evil, or even inherent immorality, as rhetoric. Indeed question of rhetoric's role in formation of character presents a genuine dilemma, one that is often corrupted in public controversies about moral education. On one hand, professors of rhetoric have no apparent special training in such ethical issues, nor is it clear why they would have special obligations. One does not have to be Allan Bloom or Carnegie Commission or even William Bennett to believe that all educators have some general obligation to influence their students for better, but it is not clear why or how this should devolve in a special way on teachers of reading, writing and speaking. It could do so only if ethical issues were found to be somehow intrinsic to rhetoric itself, to what we must teach if we are to succeed in teaching rhetoric at all--intrinsic, perhaps, to its evolution as a discipline and a practice, or to one of its fundamental functions. But how can this be squared with our notions of rhetoric as a neutral instrument? On other hand, contemporary rhetoricians have made it at least as clear that rhetoric has inescapable connections to human character, that these connections by their nature may be objects of distinctively rhetorical inquiry, that such inquiry may sustain and extend critical discourse, and that it may produce knowledge, including moral knowledge. For as Kenneth Burke has taught us, rhetoric is essentially involved in the definition of man, and admits of analysis in terms of those motives through which human characters are constituted and realized.3 Moreover, as Wayne Booth has explained, formation of self occurs in a field of selves; we are made of, as we make, company we keep.4 If our character is so significantly at stake in our rhetoric, then process of understanding rhetoric better would seem to hold some possibilities for better understanding of character. Or put more practically: if character realizes and reveals itself significantly in rhetoric, knowledge achieved in rhetorical education and critical discourse arising from it may make some issues in formation of our characters more a matter of our informed, free, ethically charged choice. But what does all this have to do with our alleged responsibility to inculcate a particular morality?

(1989). Bibliography on Argumentation. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 71-81.

Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking. Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Reviewed by Martin J. Medhurst. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 236 pp. Reviewed by Warren Rubel. The Sophists. Harold Barrett, Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp Publishers, 1981. 85+ix pp. Reviewed by William Benoit Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. Michael Heim. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987.305 pp. Reviewed by Ronald A. Sudol. Thoreau's Comments on the Art of Writing, Richard Dillman, editor. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. Reviewed by J. L. Campbell. Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition, Winifred Bryan Horner. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Reviewed by James Leonard. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Reviewed by Allen Harris. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Charles Bazerman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 332 pages. Reviewed by David S. Kaufer.

Michael Paul Rogin, "Ronald Reagan,”; the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 366pp. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 209pp. Gerald Graff. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. University of Chicago Press, 1987. viii+315 pp. $24.95. Joseph Vining, The Authoritative and the Authoritarian, University of Chicago Press, 1986. In Search of Justice: The Indiana Tradition in Speech Communication. Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback (editors). Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1987. 311 Pp. Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry. James L. Kinneavy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 186. Literary Patronage in Greece and Rome. Barbara K. Gold. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 267. Introduction to Rhetorical Theory. Gerard A. Hauser. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. The Variables of Composition: Process and Product in a Business Setting. Glen J. Broadhead and Richard C. Freed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. 169 Pp.