Invention as a Social Act (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) Book

The reason I gave this book only three stars is because I think it's a bit out-dated. In my experience (limited though it is) the kind of paradigm shift LaFevre pushed for in 1987 has occurred. She writes near the end of the book, "Changes compatible with a social view of invention have in fact already begun" (121), and I think that 25 years later those changes have become pretty standard. Perhaps my MA training was done at a decidedly theoretical instituion (University of Vermont), where most of the upper level faculty have strong theoretical backgrounds--postmodernism, Lacanian, Marxism, queer theory--which promote the questioning of individualism and the relation of atomistic individuals to their social contexts and the ideologies permeating those contexts. I simply don't feel that I learned almost anything new from this book, though it was well written and a very good introductory work to this way of thinking.