Theorizing Histories Of Rhetoric
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Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric
During the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, historians of rhetoric, composition, and communication vociferously theorized historiographical motivations and methodologies for writing histories in their fields. After this fertile period of rich, contested, and impassioned theorization, scholars busily undertook the composition of numerous historical works, complicating master narratives and recovering silenced voices and rhetorical practices. Yet, though historians in these fields have gone about the business of writing histories, the discussion of theorization has been quiet. In this welcome volume, fifteen scholars consider, once again, the theory of historiography, asking difficult questions about the purposes and methodologies of writing histories of rhetoric, broadly defined, and questioning what it means, what it should mean, what it could mean to write histories of rhetoric, composition, and communication. The topics addressed include the privileging of the literary and the textual over material artifacts as prime sources of evidence in the study of classical rhetoric, the use of rhetorical hermeneutics as a methodology for interpreting past practices, the investigation of feminist methodologies that do not fit into the dominant modes of feminist historiographical work and the examination of archives with a queer eye to better construct nondiscriminatory narratives. Contributors also explore the value of approaching historiography through the lenses of jazz improvisation and complexity theory, and the historiographical method of writing the future in ways that refigure our relationships to time and to ourselves. Consistently thoughtful and carefully argued, these essays successfully revive the discussion of historiography in rhetoric, inspiring fresh avenues of exploration in the field.
Rhetorical Realism
Rhetorical Realism responds to the surging interest in nonhumans across the humanities by exploring how realist commitments have historically accompanied understandings of rhetoric from antiquity to the present. For a discipline that often defines itself according to human speech and writing, the nonhuman turn poses a number of challenges and opportunities for rhetoric. To date, many of the responses to the nonhuman turn in rhetoric have sought to address rhetoric’s compatibility with new conceptions of materiality. In Rhetorical Realism, Scot Barnett extends this work by transforming it into a new historiographic methodology attuned to the presence and occlusion of things in rhetorical history. Through investigations of rhetoric’s place in Aristotelian metaphysics, the language invention movement of the seventeenth century, and postmodern conceptions of rhetoric as an epistemic art, Barnett’s study expands the scope of rhetorical inquiry by showing how realist ideas have worked to frame rhetoric’s scope and meanings during key moments in its history. Ultimately, Barnett argues that all versions of rhetoric depend upon some realist assumptions about the world. Rather than conceive of the nonhuman as a dramatic turning point in rhetorical theory, Rhetorical Realism encourages rhetorical theorists to turn another eye toward what rhetoricians have always done—defining and configuring rhetoric within a broader ontology of things.
Democratic Vernaculars
Democratic Vernaculars is a comprehensive, culturally inclusive, and thematically unified history of the communicative, audience-centered rhetorical vernacular that occupies the “middle range” of English, bounded on the one side by expressive structure (grammar and linguistics) and on the other by aesthetics (literature). Broadening the history of rhetoric by considering a vast collection of vernacular resources such as elementary grammars and readers, popular guidebooks, textbooks, and rhetorical treatises, this book advances the history of the rhetorical theory and pedagogy since the 17th century by examining ways in which diverse vectors of the rhetorical vernacular coalesced to produce an English language sufficiently idiomatic for practical social exchange while being, at the same time, suitable for higher literary, scholarly, and cultural pursuits. Democratic Vernaculars is essential reading for scholars in rhetoric and the histories of language and education, and can serve as a text for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric.