Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The essays in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism explore rhetoric as a practical art of deliberation and judgment, best taught and learned through concrete examples of argument, interpretation, and criticism. Historically and in our own time scholars have shown that rhetoric can very well be theorized in the strong sense that specific principles can provide direction for inquiries into thought and persuasion. But this theorizing tends to remove itself from the indeterminacies of practical life and the conflicts of representation in texts and their contexts. Moreover, many forms of what is sometimes called “rhetorical criticism” treat interpretive issues without considering the ways texts engage with complex audiences (so well articulated by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz in their essays) or practical contemporary issues (exemplarily demonstrated in James Crosswhite's essay), and without relating those matters to specific times and places (among others, for example, Thomas O. Sloane on Erasmus and Milton and Nancy S. Struever on Vico and Collingwood). And some-times theorists and even critics of rhetoric undertake very abstract discussions in spite of the fact that rhetoric involves reasoning that is necessarily embedded in particular practical problems and situations. Even those well advanced in the study of rhetoric recognize that learning and mastering rhetoric ... log in or subscribe to read full text