This essay explores intersections between reading and privilege and moves out from a survey of faculty reading practices to consider what is at stake in distinguishing between “real” and “instrumental” reading. Allen argues that, as privileged subjects, teachers can best help students approach reading as the negotiation of uncertainty when teachers themselves undertake such negotiation. That is, instructors do well to consciously inhabit and emotionally integrate their own contradictory desires for reading—the desire for institutional viability associated with instrumental reading, on the one hand, and the desire for the leisured thought of real reading, on the other.

According to an argument made by other authors, analytic —the formal logical theory of the categorical syllogism expounded in the Prior Analytics—is a relatively late development in Aristotle’s thinking about argument. As a general theory of validity, it served as the master discipline of argument in Aristotle’s mature thought about the subject. The object of this paper is to explore his early conception of the relations between the argumentative disciplines. Its principal thesis, based chiefly on evidence about the relation between dialectic and rhetoric, is that before the advent of analytic dialectic played a double role. It was both the art or discipline of one practice of argumentation and the master discipline of argument to which other disciplines turned for their understanding of the fundamentals of argument.