In his 1959 Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," C. P. Snow warned of a gulf that had opened between literary intellectuals and natural scientists, across which existed a mutual incomprehension that threatened to undermine the university's ability to solve the world's most pressing problems.Reflecting on his experience as both a novelist and a research scientist, Snow appealed for a greater understanding between what he saw as two distinct cultures, yet he also asserted the importance of the sciences over literature for securing humanity's future prosperity.According to Snow, literary intellectuals were natural Luddites, and the university needed to prioritize the training of scientists and engineers in order to accelerate global industrialization and thereby raise standards of living.His privileging of the sciences drew a scathing rebuke from the literary critic F. R. Leavis, who pilloried Snow's understanding of literature and his faith in technological progress.For Leavis, bringing the Industrial Revolution to impoverished areas of the globe could indeed improve the material conditions of humankind, but such a project ungoverned by the values conveyed through literature, especially those insights of D. H. Lawrence and other novelists into the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor, would lead to a future divested of any real quality of life.Leavis insisted, therefore, that the university revolve around English studies as its "centre of human consciousness" (2013, p. 75).This dispute between Snow and Leavis touched off "the two cultures controversy," which has been an important point of reference amid the shifting terrain of higher education.The phrase has come to denote a gulf that opens between any disciplines bound to "common attitudes, common standards and patterns of behavior, common approaches and assumptions" (Snow, 1998, p. 9) that divide them into opposing cultures and inhibit crossdisciplinary understanding.Buller (2014), for example, described the two cultures in terms of those who believe the purpose of colleges and universities is to educate "the whole person" versus those who believe it is to train students for the workforce.The latter culture, according to Buller, tends to include governors, legislators, and trustees who are inclined to divert resources away from the social sciences, arts, and humanities to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.Their assumption is that the STEM disciplines will best prepare students for careers offering the greatest return on their investment in a college education.The opposing culture, most often composed of faculty and administrators, argues that a well-rounded education produces graduates who are better informed, challenge assumptions more readily, participate more fully in society and civil discourse, and in general live healthier and more productive lives.Buller observed that "the two sides are not so much talking to one another as shouting past one another, each contingent building its case on a set of assumptions that it regards as universally true and that is dismissed by its opponents as the result of blindness, hypocrisy, or both" (p.2).This situation stands in contrast to the lack of engagement Halsted (2015) observed between the culture of academia and that of the tech industry.He pointed out that although a number of the most significant

As the plurals in the title, Rhetorics of the Americas, and dates drawn from the Epi-Olmec/Mayan calendar suggest, the scope of this anthology has been broadly conceived. By focusing on rhetorical ...

The border rhetorics that Latino/a students bring into the classroom can help them and other students resist being appropriated by academic discourse. For example, the corrido involves a mimicry of conventions that enables students to envision a fluid identity rather than exchange one identity for another.

Though Plato may have been making a metaphysical argument when he valorized orality over textuality in Phaedrus, a close reading of “Plato's Pharmacy” reveals that Jacques Derrida's response, which reversed Plato's oral/textual dissociation, was metaphorical. The difference/differénce between the metaphysical and metaphorical is itself lost in the Yale School's translation of French deconstruction into American poststructuralism. When the Yale School's metaphysical interpretation of poststructuralism, and particularly the literary notion of the author, is imported into composition, Derrida's claim that writing is “essentially democratic” is itself reversed, and the student subject is deconstructed alongside student writing.

I argue that the debate between the Elizabethan theater and the Puritans was more than a simple argument about public morals. Drawing on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concepts of arguments that structure reality, I examine this debate as a rhetorical struggle over the way reality itself would be conceptualized by a culture. This historically situated debate can, in turn, shed light on the political implications of arguments that structure reality.