Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth

Abstract

Rhetoric has been concerned with truth from the beginning. Beginning at least with Plato, rhetoric often has been blamed for the death of truth. And the field of contemporary rhetorical studies has been skeptical of easy understandings of truth. Meanwhile, hostility to truth seems to be doing a lot of damage, even if truth itself may never have been as reliable as hoped. The idea of post-truth poses systemic problems for rhetoric’s traditional concerns. Active obfuscation, negation of truth, and even truth-indifference are certainly not new. But the past couple of decades have seen a proliferation and pervasiveness of falsities, rendering the term “post-truth” an identifiable marker of the contemporary moment. Everyday public life regularly throws up examples of both post-truth in action and efforts to combat it by invoking truth. This edited volume draws on the resources of rhetoric to understand what here is new, what is old, and what may be done about the problem. Scott Sundvall is an associate professor of English at the University of Memphis and the editor of Rhetorical Speculations: Emerging Technologies and the Future and Potential of Rhetoric and Writing Studies . Caddie Alford is associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality .