T he goal of this essay is to present an argument for the unity of Isocrates' l speech Antidosis which takes into account its complexity. Isocrates recognized the unusual nature of the discourse he was creating and talked explicitly about its complexity and the need for the reader's careful attention. To argue for the unity, or cohesion, of the speech, I will examine Isocratean notions of unity specifically, especially in the use of stylistic terminology related to mixtures. Then I shall examine how these ideas fall in with ideas of unity more generally in Greek composition. After examining these approaches, we can then look at the progress within the Antidosis and its particular sense of cohesion on both structural and thematic levels. The two levels of structure and theme are intimately related, and thus will need to be treated together. In attending to the issues proposed, I hope to set out some ideas on how Isocrates perceives unity to function, how notions of unity are affected by the rhetorical situation, how multiple ideas can be unified in one discourse, and finally how this discourse can demonstrate Isocratean methods of rhetorical composition. The speech presents an important example of the possibilities of expanding discourse to serve multiple functions. As such, the speech and its mixed unities can be relevant to ideas about the discourse of modem times as well as ancient. About 354/3 BC Isocrates created the fiction of defending himself before a jury in his speech known as the Antidosis. The speech responds to an actual antidosis procedure in which Isocrates had been asked to finance from his private estate a public expense known as a liturgy. Through this rather elaborate antidosis procedure, an Athenian citizen who was asked to finance a liturgy could request that another citizen take over that burden if the latter were more financially capable. The latter then had the option to finance the liturgy or exchange estates. If the challenged person refused the two options, the issue would go to a court (MacDowell 162-4). This antidosis procedure, as a question of one's private estate, would be handled as a private case (MacDowell 58). That is, this was a private dispute between two individuals. But when Isocrates found himself in such a situation, being asked to take on someone else's liturgy, this private litigation also raised the question of his history of public service. Isocrates defended his willingness to take on liturgies (15.5, 15.158),1 but he saw the charge as a broader attack on his public life and as evidence of confusion or envy on the part of most Athenians. He states in the opening of the Antidosis:

In the first half of On Demosthenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus' mature critical essay, he presents the case that Isocrates, Plato and represent the three finest stylists when it comes to speaking with the diction approved by audiences. In the process of making an argument for the Demosthenic ideal, Dionysius needed to find commensurate speeches by Isocrates and Plato to compare with Demosthenes. For Isocrates, he compared the most elegant portion of On the Peace with a portion of an epideictic from Demosthenes' Third Olynthiac. It was a good choice. However, for Plato, finding an appropriate speech in the philosopher's writing proved more difficult. Of course, we would readily assume that by the first century BCE Dionysius should have felt compelled to use the Apology as the Platonic exemplar. It clearly ranks as one of the impressive speeches in all of history. For his part, were he not to use it, Dionysius was well aware critics would complain that the Apology presents itself as the ideal choice for this kind of analysis. So in anticipation of this objection and his otherwise obscure choice to use Socrates' funeral oration in the Menexenus, he dismisses Plato's Apology as something other than a true forensic and therefore not a viable candidate. He offers the following tantalizingly cryptic reason: There is one forensic by Plato, the Apology of Socrates; but this never saw even the threshold of a law-court or an open assembly, but was written for another purpose and belongs to the category neither of oratory nor of dialogue. I therefore pass over it. (On Dem. 23). Within his own lifetime Dionysius already felt compelled to respond to charges of impiety for committing the sin of suggesting that one could find infelicities in Plato's compositional style. In a letter responding to Gnaeus Pompeius' complaint that, You should not have exposed the faults of Plato when your purpose was to praise Demosthenes (Gn. Pomp. 1), Dionysius responded that had he not objectively compared the best discourses of Isocrates and Plato with those of his argument would have been unpersuasive as well as a criti

T hroughout this essay, I argue that the three primary extant fragments of Gorgias of Leontini-On Non-Existence (or On Nature), the Encomium of Helen, and the Defense of Palamedes-are not disparate or contradictory statements, as is often assumed, but intricately interrelated and internally consistent contributions to a complex theory and art (techne') of rhetoric. Of course, we cannot argue that Gorgias composed these texts with a holistic rhetorical task in mind; however, reconstructing and interpreting On Non-Existence, the Helen, and the Palamedes holistically does shed significant new light on our current understanding of Gorgias' emerging theory and techne' of rhetoric. In brief, On Non-Existence describes the effects that externally given realities (ta onta) have on the human psyche (psuche), the Helen explores the unethical workings of the persuasive arts on the human psuche, and the Palamedes demonstrates rhetorical topoi for the invention of arguments designed to move the human psuche' of a forensic audience to ethical action. Reconstructed thus as a holistic statement, Gorgias' primary extant fragments theorize the social nature of linguistic symbols and explore their artistic uses for both unethical and ethical purposes; and as a holistic interpretation of the extant fragments demonstrates, Gorgias favors the topical invention of ethical arguments over the magical invention of false arguments, unsupported opinions, and deliberate deceptions. Criticism of Gorgianic rhetoric as inartistic is almost as ancient as the very texts themselves. Plato, who probably wrote some of his earliest dialogues while Gorgias was still living and teaching in Athens, argues that Gorgianic rhetoric is not a techne. In the Gorgias, for example, Plato (through the mouthpiece of Socrates) tells the character Gorgias that his conception and practice of rhetoric whose scope is logos is not a true art but merely a false art, a form of flattery because its goal is to elicit pleasure and not to discover the Good. Moreover, in the Phaedrus Plato explains that sophistic rhetoric is irrational and thus atechnical because it is not founded on truth discovered through the principles of philosophical dialectic. No activity, according to Plato, is artistic unless it begins with a foundation of pure universal knowledge discovered through dialectical inquiry, and it is precisely because those who claim to teach and practice the art of rhetoric are ignorant of dialectic that they incapable of properly defining rhetoric, and that in turn leads them to imagine that by possessing themselves of the requisite antecedent learning they have discovered the art itself' (269b). But if we accept Plato's philosophy/rhetoric demarcation along with the claim that all

In one way or another, an interest in has been present in from writings of Gorgias and Plato, through treatises on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres,' and on to work of Kenneth Burke, particularly his notions of identification and consubstantiality.2 As in many disciplines, has played its part implicitly in rhetorical theory and pedagogy. For example, reader response criticism addresses in terms of affective and subjective aspects of epistemic and composition theory; rhetorical interest in memory addresses theories of knowledge, sources of inspiration, and subjectivity in prewriting (see Rider, Reynolds), all of which are body-centered; bodily delivery remains a concern in speech communication. The rhetoric of and, more specifically, of medical science, explores ways in which medicalized is both socially and discursively constructed (see Duden). More recently, feminist rhetoricians such as Janice Norton have begun a historiography of which focuses on need to reread a rhetorical theory that theorizes without reference to sexual difference. Only recently, however, has the body as such become explicit locus of debates about interrelation of power and discourse. This annotated bibliography surveys germinal texts which read in terms of epistemology, gender construction, and social inscription of meaning. Its intent is to assist rhetoricians who wish to investigate as a crucial site of intersection of persuasion, discourse, and power. More explicit discussions of began when Anglo-American feminists asserted that the personal is political and French feminists exhorted us to write body. Since then, a number of disciplines have begun to work out what this focus on personal and could possibly mean: gendered body? symbolic body? social-political body? discursive body? While feminists are credited with initiating discussions of female as text or site in which issues of power are hotly contested, has become locus of cultural, historical, sociological, philosophical, and literary, as well as gender studies. As Anthony Synnott reminds us, is

James L. Kinneavy, who was until this year the Blumberg Centennial Profes sor of English at the University of Texas, has been one of the major influences on the development of composition for more than 25 years. His bestknown book, A Theory of Discourse, published in 1971, is credited by many in our field with promoting the revival of rhetoric in university English That book was followed in 1976 by Aims and Audiences in Writing and Writing-Basic Modes of Organization (Both written with John Cope and J.W. Campbell). Kinneavy's theory of discourse relies on his definition of discourse as any utterance having a beginning, middle and end, and a purpose. He explained his theory graphically by means of his well-known communications triangle. this interview, conducted in May 1996 in Austin, Texas, he offers some ways that the triangle can be used in teaching writing. He also uses the trianglewith its acknowledged debt to Jakobson-to generate his theory of the major aims of discourse. Using this taxonomy, Kinneavy attempts to explain the basic organizational pattern of each aim of discourse. But Kinneavy does not wish to be known solely or even principally as a taxonomer, for, as he says, taxonomy is only a part of theory, and he has extended much of his influence as a theorist and historian of rhetoric. His 1987 book, Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith, explains how the new testament idea of faith grew out of the use of the term pisteis by Isocrates and Aristotle. Kairos is another term frequently associated with Kinneavy because of his lucid explanation of the term in his work. Kinneavy is credited with demonstrating the moral aspect of kairos, establishing a link between it and justice by arguing that to be moral and just means to observe the proper measure in action and words. At the end of the interview, with typical Kinneavian modesty in response to a question about how he looks back on his career as a scholar and teacher, he concedes that In the discipline of rhetoric, tried to recognize the importance of history and the importance of theory and the importance of the empirical. Finally, with a touch of pride, he closes with this admission: I think one of the most important contributions gave to rhetoric as a discipline was as one of the people-Corbett comes to mind; a lot of other people come to mind-who gave rhetoric a respectable name as a scholarly discipline in English departments. Few, if any, of the many members of our profession whose minds have been touched by Kinneavy would disagree.

The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan by David Metzger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. xvi; 135. Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence by Richard Leo Enos. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1995; xii + 135pp. Nineteenth‐Century Women Learn to Write edited by Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 1995. 343 pp. Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought edited by Bernard L. Brock. Tuscaloosa, U of Alabama P, 1995; xii; 279 pp. A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition by W. Ross Winterowd & Jack Blum. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. A Teacher's Introduction to Postmodernism by Ray Linn Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character by Eugene Garver. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 325 pp.

T here is a long-standing tension between the community and rheto ricians of with regard to the status of truth and the objectivity of knowledge. While neither the community nor the community of rhetorical scholars can be said to be monolithic in their views, the scientific view ascribes objective, permanent, and universal status to the facts produced by scientists, whereas the view supported by many rhetoricians describes facts as products of social conditions, and therefore marked by inter-subjectivity, transience, and situational delimitations. The classical account thus sees facts as discovered, whereas the sophistic rhetorical account portrays them as constructed (e.g., Fuller; Gaonkar; Gusfield; Latour; Latour and Woolgar; Lessl; Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey; Taylor, Defining Science).' As a variety of scholars have suggested, this bifurcation of views can be resolved into a unified perspective that accounts for the major arguments advanced by those supporting each of the classical orientations (Bambrough; Bernstein; Laudan, Explaining Success). It is possible, in other words, to see facts as both objective and situated-both faithful to material realities and responsive to social conditions (Howe and Lyne). From this unified perspective, scientists can make errors either because their contact with asocial material realities are flawed (e.g., cold fusion) or because there are flaws in their application of the linguistic and social codes that convey the character and meaning of the contact they have made with material realities. This essay explores the persistence of bad science of the latter sort by reporting and interpreting an interaction between scientists and a rhetorician, one that occurred when I sent a letter to the journal Science responding to a publication on brain sex research by Gur et al. (Sex Differences), which appeared in that journal. I was later interviewed by a reporter for a major newspaper with regard to my letter and the Gur research. The texts for this study therefore include the Gur research article, my letter, a reply to my letter by the authors of the Gur article, the two reviews of my letter solicited by the editor of Science, and the journalistic account of my letter and the scientists' publications. This essay interprets the response of these scientists and the integration of their work into the public sphere through theories of demarcation. It suggests that bad science, at least that which supports an ideology that is hegemonic in the social sphere,2 is maintained by a complex relationship beRSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 83 Volume 26, Number 4 Fall 1996

Norms of Rhetorical Culture by Thomas B. Farrell. New Haven and London: Yale UP 1993; x + 374pp. Hermogenes On Issues; Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric, by Malcolm Heath, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995; pp. ix + 274. The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, 1642–1660, by Elizabeth Skerpan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992; 264 pages. The Rhetoric of Courtship: Courting and Courtliness in Elizabethan Language and Literature; by Catherine Bates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 236 pages. Philosophy, Rhetoric, Literary Criticism: (Inter)views edited Gary A. Olson, with a foreword by Clifford Geertz. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1994. 250 pp. Understanding Scientific Prose ed. Jack Selzer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993; 388 pp. Learning from the Histories of Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of Winifred Bryan Horner, ed. Theresa Enos. Southern Illinois UP; 1993; 200 pp. Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle, by Richard Enos. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993. 159 pages.

Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing in America by Jasper Neel. Southern Illinois U P: Carbondale, 1994. 225 pp.

Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol and Ritual in the Greco‐Roman Era by Donovan J. Ochs. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1993; xiv + 130pp. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students by Sharon Crowley. New York: Macmillan, 1994. 364 pages; glossary; time‐line of important moments in Greek and Roman rhetoric; bibliography; index. Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke. Edited by Barry Brummett. Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1993; xix; 290 pp. Ramon Hull's New Rhetoric: Text and Translation of Llull's Rethorica Nova. Ed. and Trans. Mark D. Johnson. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1994; 1; 109. Thinking Through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing by James Thomas Zebroski. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook P, 1994. 334 pages. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth‐Century England, by Steven Shapin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994. Pp. 483.

(1995). Deliberative rhetoric and forensic stasis: Reconsidering the scope and function of an ancient rhetorical heuristic in the aftermath of the Thomas/Hill controversy. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 25, No. 1-4, pp. 223-230.

When James Boswell first meets Samuel Johnson in London in 1763, Johnson has already written the Rambler (1750-52), the Dictionary (1755), and Rasselas (1759), and dominates the publishing marketplace. They become close friends, and, until Johnson's death in 1784, Boswell often records in his journals Johnson's conversations, documenting his Wisdom and Wit and describing Johnson's encounters with his contemporaries. After Johnson's death, Boswell augments his own collection of Johnsonian memorabilia by soliciting anecdotes and letters from many of Johnson's friends, accumulating a mass of material which he pieces together and publishes in 1791 as The Life of Johnson, perhaps the most powerful and controversial biography ever written. In this influential biography of Johnson's life, Boswell presents Johnson as the great sage and philosopher, the composing genie who could dash off brilliant, eloquent essays and verse, seemingly without planning, revising or even rereading them. With this picture Boswell tries to create Johnson as the ideal writer of the age, whose writing method and style perfectly exemplify the paradigm of composition that prevailed in eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorical theory, particularly that of Adam Smith. Influenced by Smith's lectures, which he had attended while a student at Glasgow University, Boswell constructs Johnson as writer within this paradigm and thus fosters both a narrow view of invention and a mythological image of Johnson as inspired speedwriting genius. In the process, he misrepresents Johnson's theory of writing, tying Johnson too closely to what W.S. Howell calls Smith's new rhetoric (541), which focuses on style and views invention as an autonomous activity based on introspection and imagination rather than as interactive, systematic inquiry, Aristotle's conception of invention. A careful reading of the Life of Johnson reveals major contradictions in the picture Boswell sketches of Johnson as writer and indicates that Boswell's mythical image of Johnson's spontaneous writing ability tends to rest upon thin and questionable anecdotal evidence, upon the clever way Boswell arranges and phrases his material, upon the narrow conception of invention he inherited from Adam Smith, and upon his need to canonize Johnson into literary sainthood and even to make him the secular Godhead of the age, the Father of modern writing. At the same time, it is difficult to avoid concluding that most contemporary critics remain mesmerized by Boswell's myth and impelled by his same motives.

(1994). Teaching stones to talk: Using stasis theory to teach students the art of dialectic. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 24, No. 3-4, pp. 88-95.

(1994). Neo‐sophistic rhetorical theory: Sophistic precedents for contemporary epistemic rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 24, No. 3-4, pp. 16-24.

(1994). Forensic rhetoric and the constitution of the subject: Innocence, truth, and wisdom in Gorgias’ palamedes and Plato's apology. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 24, No. 3-4, pp. 148-166.

Whenever I give a talk about the Rhetoric, audiences ask about rhetorical deception and fraud, about the morality of rhetoric, and about how to tell a good rhetorician from a sophist. The first and most important thing to say about the Rhetoric in connection with such questions of the morality of rhetoric is that Aristotle has very little to say about them, and, as far as I can tell, very little interest in them. Contemporary readers of the Rhetoric see people constantly duped by slick commercial and political advertisements, and hope that the Rhetoric can help them become conscious of hidden persuasion, or to make more morally based discriminations between decent appeals, which they should trust, and immoral ones, which they should reject. Rhetoric is often promoted today as an equivalent to defensive driving. It is worth asking why these questions have so little interest for Aristotle.

Whatever dates Composition historians suggest as the beginning of modern composition studies whether it's 1949-50 with the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, or 1961 with the publication of Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer's Research in Written Composition, or 1971 with the publication of Janet Emig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders they all agree that the modern study of written communication is at least two decades old, with its gradual emergence occurring over decade or so. One way of marking the emergence of this new discipline is to look for the rise of what Robert Connors has called a coherently evolved of composition (Introduction xii). In fact, the journal literature of the 1950s and early 1960s is full of suggestions for theoretical foundation for the study and teaching of writing. Finding coherent theory that the field could embrace, however, was problematic.

Defining the New Rhetorics, edited by Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Newbury Park: Sage, 1993; pp. 243 + Introduction, Index Nineteenth‐Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American Connection by Winifred Bryan Horner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 211 Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama by Jody Enders. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992;xiv; 281. Rhetoric and Society Series, ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn. Peter Ramus's Attack on Cicero: Text and Translation of Ramus's Brutinae Quaestiones. Ed. James J. Murphy.Trans. Carole Newlands. Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1992. Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art by Ruben Quintero. Newark: U of Delaware Press, 1992; 187. Cast by Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development by Bryan C. Short. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Central to an understanding of the history and theory of classical rhetoric is an understanding of the keywords the ancients used to discuss their art. Keywords are those terms which are integral to a text's argument and which often resonate with complex denotations and connotations (Welsch). Keywords carry a heavy freight of meaning that simple, single-word definitions often cannot render. Furthermore, single-word conceptualizations tend to foist the reader's own associations onto the ancient and foreign words. The solution to this problem is not to translate

(1994). A closer look at education as epideictic rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 23, No. 3-4, pp. 70-89.

By now there seems widespread consensus among scholars on rhetoric that Protagoras and Gorgias, the leading sophists of the fifth century B.C.E., made significant progress in building a theory of discourse that excluded any absolute standard for the judgment of truth. These ancient sophists thus anticipated today's prevailing school of rhetoricians, who hold that absolute standard for the judgment of truth can never be found ... because the individual mind can never transcend personal emotions, social circumstances, and historical conditions.1 This position prevented the two sophists from adopting, as it now impels us to set aside, the terms knowledge and truth in their classic objective sense since neither consciousness nor discourse can be supposed accurately to represent an absolute and non-contingent external reality. Robert Scott's famous 1967 article On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic, from which we often date the current renaissance of anti-foundationalism in rhetoric, repeatedly acknowledged Protagoras and Gorgias as pioneers. And the resonance has been repeatedly acknowledged since (Jarratt &9, Crowley 332, Meiland 51, Newman 47). Patricia Bizzell has pointed out, however, that something is missing from today's anti-foundationalist rhetoric:

Imitation has long been a method and theoretical basis for rhetorical instruction. It has also enjoyed a complex, if not always glorious, history-a lineage which extends from the apprenticeship of sophists in Plato's Greece to the moral education of orators in Quintilian's Rome; from the nurturing of abundant expression in a Renaissance text by Erasmus to the cultivation of taste in an Enlightenment text by Hugh Blair. In the last few decades, however, we have witnessed dramatic changes in how we look upon imitation-changes largely influenced, we think, by the process movement, with its various emphases on invention and revision, expression and discovery, cognition and collaboration. In the wake of shifting so much of our attention to writing processes, we might well expect imitation to have been pronounced as dead as Nietzche's God was a century ago. But if the literature reviewed here is any indication, rumors of imitation's death have been greatly exaggerated. Most of the studies in our survey are favorablyand surprisingly-disposed to imitation's continued practice. Such studies typically call for a revised understanding of imitation, a novel approach which reveals the proponent's understanding of the need to somehow demonstrate imitation's acceptability to a community which presumably resists its use. Why? Most likely because imitation turns on assumptions about writing and learning which many find discomforting, if not altogether objectionable. There are, of course, fairly complex historical, cultural, and theoretical reasons for our current aversion to imitation, many of which we explore later in our review. But the important point for us is that those who argue for imitation-however much they may differ in their various arguments-share an awareness that its use must be justified in answer to, and anticipation of, its critical refusal by the community at large. What we infer from this awareness is the community's largely tacit rejection of imitation. That's not to say, of course, that explicit criticism of imitation is wholly absent from the literature.' But in a context where many readily assent to the idea that almost any form of direct imitation leads to a distortion of the writing process, there is little urgency to speak against its use in the writing classroom (Judy and Judy 127). Indeed, only those who desire a reevaluation of imitation need

Rhetorical criticism, as it has developed over the past five decades or so, has taken on many agendas-for example, neo-Aristotelian criticism, movement studies, dramatistic criticism, genre criticism-all of which have been attempts to apply, reconstruct, or improve on a long tradition. What is striking about this body of critical literature is that none of it takes very seriously one of the paramount concerns of that tradition-namely, style. Indeed, a survey of the periodical literature shows that there persists a fundamental neglect of in both the theory and the practice of rhetorical criticism.1 Various theoretical and critical practices represented in this body of literature suggest that is a frustratingly elusive and amorphous creature, stubbornly resisting description. Most of the material does not venture much beyond theory and is, for the critic, consequently inadequate, for it falls short of a level of analysis that would reveal how rhetoric works. As a result, rhetorical criticism does not provide a useful critical approach to reading a discursive text. In one respect, this shows that some incisive remarks about the importance of in criticism and the neglect thereof which Donald Bryant made over thirty years ago have been either disregarded or forgotten. Moreover, I argue that both the interpretation of discourse (criticism) and the production of discourse (composition) can profit from careful attention to rhetorical style. For if, as Bryant2 has suggested, style is the final elaboration of meaning, then surely is the initial encounter through which auditors apprehend meaning. Does it not seem reasonable that ought play a major role in the critical act of the analysis of discourse? However, granting that has been neglected, I now must explain what I mean by style. To begin, Bryant has urged us to regard it not as the mere department of elocutio but that in dispositio and even inventio participate. Bryant argues: It is difficult at best to consider the functioning language of discourse without becoming involved at once with the ordering of the discourse. Furthermore, if we go beyond the static idea of disposition as arrangement, to the potentially dynamic idea of disposition as disposing, as Wagner thought necessary, we may conclude that for the critic the two names signify the two lenses for a stereopticon view of a

An interpretive strategy used in several recent studies of Gorgias involves attending to his style as a means of understanding his substantive ideas. This hermeneutic approach is not confined to studies of Gorgias, of course, for critics have frequently explored the ways in which a philosopher's manner of writinghis or her use of the aphorism, meditation, dialogue, philosophical poem, or remark, for example-may elucidate the content of his or her thinking. But the strategy has proved especially inviting for interpreting Gorgias for two reasons. First, the substance of Gorgias's thought is particularly elusive, not only because much of his writing is lost and his few extant texts are frequently fragmentary and corrupt, but because he leaves many key terms undefined and ambiguous, and he appears to make contradictory assertions and claims. In this context, a strategy of reading that purports to clarify and render coherent his enigmatic thought is understandably appealing. Second, the hermeneutic strategy is particularly inviting because Gorgias himself seems to have attached enormous importance to his style, one often associated with such figures of speech as antithesis, anadiplosis (repetition of words), homoeoteleuton (likeness of sound in final syllables of successive words or clauses) and parisosis (arrangement of words in nearly equal periods). Given Gorgias's attention to matters of style, it is not unreasonable to presume that they may offer a clue to understanding his enigmatic In this essay, I will examine two prominent schools of critics who employ this hermeneutic strategy, and who arrive at conflicting interpretations of Gorgias's overall philosophy. I then argue that each of these readings misconstrues the nature of Gorgias's writing, and I present an alternative reading of his style. I conclude by suggesting that given his stylistic practice, Gorgias may possess a different conception of philosophy than that presumed by many of his interpreters. Before examining these two schools of interpretation, it is useful to place them in respect to what may be termed the traditional construal of Gorgias's style and its implications about his putative For traditionally, most critics have seen Gorgias's style as poetic, and have viewed his apparent preoccupation with style as an indication that he not a serious philosopher at all, but rather a mere stylist, an orator who deploys poetic devices to embellish his speeches. This view is first suggested by Plato, who describes Gorgias's style as an elegant feast designed to please an audience rather than explore philosophical issues (Gorgias 447a). Aristotle echoes this portrayal of Gorgias as a poetic stylist lacking serious ideas, asserting that:

Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured by Susan C. Jarratt. Southern Illinois University Press, 1991; pp. xxvi + 154.

Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King Jr. and its Sources by Keith D. Miller. New York: The Free Press, 1992. 247 pp. +. Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman by Walter Jost. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse by Kathleen E. Welch. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990; pp. viii + 186. Constructing Rhetorical Education, edited by Marie Secor and Davida Charney. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; pp. 432 + Preface, Index. Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation and Reality by Ruth Morse. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp.ii + 295.

(1992). A historicist recontextualization of the enthymeme. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 1-24.

Almost all modern historians of rhetoric have undertaken to separate the men from the boys. But while rhetoric itself was talked about among men, it was to boys, and the handbooks that we have inherited-as well as most of those that we have lost-were intended for the instruction of the young. Feminist objections to classical rhetoric as been conducted among men-not women are consonant with this analysis, but I wish to emphasize here the ageism and academic self-hatred that we support when we accept the suppression of the pedagogical aspects of the history of our profession.' The dismissal of earlier pedagogical textbooks by both traditional and revisionist historians of rhetoric seems to me to be part of post-romantic unteachability topos, which assumes that what is most important about education is what least resembles the classroom.2 This topos is reinforced by more recent one that can be equally debilitating: the fear of teaching topos, in which having taught becomes synonymous with having oppressed.3 We can see their suppression of the pedagogical focus of classical rhetoric in the choice of rhetoric texts from earlier eras that traditional historians elevate to authoritative status. At one extreme is the modern canonization of Aristotle's Rhetoric, text that was never popular as pedagogical treatise in the ancient world, and at the other the rejection of Cicero's De invenltione and the Pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herenniurn. two rhetoric handbooks widely used in schools for hundreds of years. It is to the credit of traditional historians of rhetoric who are attempting to reclaim classical rhetoric as viable and important pedagogical alternative that they have been affected by this prejudice against pedagogy more in what they say than in what they do. Corbett's Handbook of Classical Rhetoric, for example, lavishly praises Aristotle's Rhetoric but, as the title reveals, presents its pedagogical material in fashion much closer to that of the Ciceronian tradition. Thomas Sloane, making passionate appeal in College English for the reclaiming of Ciceronian invention, dismisses De inventione as a famous and regrettably enduring handbook (462) before proceeding to extrapolate pedagogical content readily available in De invenhtione from the more diffuse and less pedagogically relevant De oratore.4

The ancient sophists' investigation of physis and nomos, which took place against backdrop of unpopular and unsettling Peloponnesian War, challenged foundations of Greek society. Although essentially patriarchal nature of Greek society precludes assuming any concern for status of women, in many fundamental ways sophists' project was not unlike that of modern feminists who also question dominant definitions and categories of gendered subjectivity (Jarratt Feminism). In United States, a great deal of current feminist theory also emerged in wake of unpopular Vietnam War. War promotes and depends upon cultural bonding and social solidarity to produce patriotic fervor and unquestioning allegiance to state. In these two eras, eventual unpopularity of war-which irritated and was irritated by renegotiation of class and economic boundariesopened questions about status of citizenship, economic privilege, family life and, of course, gender roles. In both eras these changes were endorsed by many who had heretofore been excluded from many of benefits of patriarchy, but they were resisted by others who feared losing or sharing privilege. Although popular mythology insists upon illusion of progressive enlightenment, there is ample evidence to support argument that periods of progressive change have often been followed by periods of repression and even regression (Kelly). The sophists' project came to an abrupt end when their pluralistic argument and pragmatic adaptations were replaced by monolithic patriarchal certainty of Plato and Aristotle-a certainty which in various guises still operates on modern society. In Page duBois's words, Plato, in fourth century, appropriated feminine and particularly reproductive metaphors in order to reaffirm old patterns of dominance and to establish through new rationalization certain objects of knowledge, certain forms of power (2). Currently, we are experiencing a similar conservative backlasheconomic, racist, and sexist-which, as Susan Jeffords's work on Vietnam War shows, enacts the large-scale renegotiation and regeneration of interests, values, and projects of patriarchy now taking place in U.S. social relations (xi). The sophistic era was marked by intellectual excitement, but sophists' explorations were not universally acclaimed nor were they even in agreement with each other. Some of their ideas threatened members of aristocracy who were eager to undo democratic reforms, while other ideas, for example famous dictum that justice is interest of stronger, threatened democratic principles. The basis of sophistic practice and teaching was discovery and exposition of opposing and contradictory arguments-dissoi logoi-in order to provide their students with training in moral reasoning and discursive ability which would allow them to assume civic responsibility

(1992). Rhetoric, possibility, and women's status in ancient Athens: Gorgias' and Isocrates' encomiums of Helen. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 22, Feminist Rereadings in the History of Rhetoric, pp. 99-108.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799) enjoyed considerable recognition as a Scottish advocate and judge; however, a passion for the ancient Greeks occupied much of his attention and contributed to his lasting reputation as a man of letters. It is likely that his initial exposure to the Greek philosophers was under the tutelage of Dr. Francis Skene, a classical scholar who worked early in his career as Burnett's private tutor and then became a professor of philosophy at Marischal College where Burnett was a student. Burnett found ancient doctrines to be appealing because of their attention to first principles and he remained a devoted advocate of Greek thinking throughout his life.' Monboddo's views on the ancients and their significance for the Scottish Enlightenment are best preserved in two lengthy works. Origin and Progress of Language (1774-92) consists of six volumes and is best known to students of composition, rhetoric, and criticism for its defense of Greek literary style in general; its efforts to apply ancient doctrines of style, logic and composition to the needs of the Scottish Enlightenment; and its praise of Aristotle in particular as the philosopher who bridged the gulf separating the sophists and Plato. Ancient Metaphysics (1779-99), also six volumes, was Monboddo's second contribution to the world of letters and further proclaimed his admiration for the Greeks and his distaste for alternative schools of thought that had become popular among his contemporaries.2 By the latter years of the Eighteenth Century, Aristotle and other Greek rhetors were largely ignored by British rhetorical theorists. Even among those exponents of a classical doctrine early in the century, including John Ward (A System of Oratory, 1759) and John Holmes (The Art of Rhetoric Made Easy, 1755), it was the Roman model of rhetoric, organized around Cicero's officia that was popular. By mid-century, even Roman doctrine had been obscured by the rhetorics, reflecting new assumptions and organizing doctrine along three new lines. The psychological school, most clearly illustrated by George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), was influenced by Baconian and Lockean thinking. These theorists, using the Baconian empirical method, explored relationships between thought and expression, creating an array of new terms to account for mental processes that govern rhetorical acts.3

James Boyd White in Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the explains one of his uses of the term rhetoric, of which, he contends, the language of law is species (33): A judge's or lawyer's language, he notes, is argumentatively constitutive of the language it employs; such language is not only instrumental in arguing but announces, in effect, Here in this language is the way this and similar cases should be talked (34). Legal professionals thus shape language behavior; the dynamics of such processes and similar ones are the objects of White's attention and analysis in the several studies included in Heracles' Bow and in When Words Lose Their Meaning. White's analyses of the rhetorical nature of the law embody detailed suggestions which, if realized, could work positive influences. He frequently makes statements like the following: Law should take as its most central question what kind of we should be, with what values, motives, and aims (42). Indeed, in White's thinking, law and rhetoric are to be seen as linked in broad shaping process, one which promises to build a of certain sort, set of shared relations, attitudes, and meanings. To view law as rhetoric might enable us to attend to the spiritual or meaningful side of our collective life (42-43). The points made by White in his essays embody praiseworthy aims; in the present essay, I will illuminate one type of aim in exploring White's claims concerning law and rhetoric operating in communities of certain sort, those of the U. S. Constitution. When Words Lose Their Meaning presents the legal and epistemological basis for the communities of the Constitution in reading of Justice John Marshall's Supreme Court decision of McCulloch v. Maryland. This decision, White contends, activated the inert Constitution of the United States and, in effect, exercised reconstitution of culture and community (247). The issues he treats are complex and of interest to rhetoricians. The discussion here will emphasize U. S. Constitution that establishes variety of communities engaged in rhetorical practices. The variety occurs along with number of benefits, because the Constitution's communicants are invited to act in most cases while free of specifications and directives. Such an invitation leaves room for communicator to consider specific circumstances, to engage in the activity Aristotle designated in terms of blank paradigm, that is, to find the available means of persuasion in given case (7). White in his confrontation of several paradoxical issues suggested by McCulloch v. Maryland raises the sorts of questions which he asks in his other essays, questions about communities and the nature of the texts with which they are associated. He is interested in the boundaries, strengths and limitations of the Constitution and of the nature of its rhetorical communities.

Oral and Written Communication: Historical Approaches. Edited by Richard Leo Enos. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990. Pp.vi + 264. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Newly Translated, with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by George Kennedy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, xvi + 335 pp. Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge by Greg Meyers. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1990. Ethics in Human Communication by Richard L. Johannesen. 3rd Edition. Waveland Press, 1990. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action by James V. Wertsch. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 147 pp. + references and name and subject index. Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science by J. Vernon Jensen. Newark: University of Delaware, 1991. Pp. 253. The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry. Edited by Herbert W. Simons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 388.

(1991). Isocrates and Plato on rhetoric and rhetorical education. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 60-71.

(1991). Aristotle and the stasis theory: A reexamination. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 53-59.

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

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).

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 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

George Kimball Plochmann & Franklin E. Robinson, A Friendly Companion to Plato's GORGIAS. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 415 pp. Perspectives on Literacy. Edited by Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Pp. xix + 476.

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.

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

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.