Reviews for The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide

The average rating for The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-07-08 00:00:00 Robert Miller Rhetoric Over the Centuries and Current Challenges - I became aware of this book when looking for something fairly recent about rhetoric and related scholarship to help put Collin Gifford Brooke’s "Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media (New Dimensions in Computers and Composition)" into perspective regarding the overall field. The book provided the kind of treatment I was seeking, even mention of Brooke and current challenges in the way the study of rhetoric has developed over the centuries. To begin with, the book includes a Foreword from the first edition of the book in 1990 by Walter J. Ong, the late eminent Orality and Literacy scholar (see my review of "An Ong Reader: Challanges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press Communication Series Media Ecology)"). Getting ahold of the book was worth it to me just for the Foreword itself. For instance (on pg. 1), Ong clearly defines rhetoric and why its study is important. For instance, “. . . the term rhetoric . . . commonly suggests verbal profusion, calculated to manipulate an audience, an operation whose aims are suspect . . . Yet . . . in the past, rhetoric was commonly used to refer to one of the most consequential . . . of all human activities. As the art of . . . producing genuine conviction in an audience, rhetoric affected the entire range of human action . . . The study and use of rhetoric enabled one to move others and get things done.” Because of my familiarity with Ong, I read his piece initially, and then principle editor Lynée Lewis Gaillet’s Preface to the 2010 edition which actually comes first. This sequence made sense to me as Ong’s Foreword was a welcome reminder about rhetoric study relevance. Whereas, the Preface tells about origins of the book, its earlier editions and the ways the third edition is different. It also gives an overview of the field as a whole at this time. Right from the beginning the challenges facing rhetoric studies begin to reveal themselves such as related in Roxanne Mountford’s “A Century After the Divorce: Challenges to a Rapprochement Between Speech Communication and English” from the Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (2009). This piece relates the Rhetoric field’s current concentration on composition and writing (which is curiously surprising and revealing to outsiders like me given its origins). The book proceeds through the major eras addressed by rhetoric studies prepared by its respective specialist editors: (1) The Classical Period (Lois Agnew), (2) The Middle Ages (Denise Stodola), (3) The Renaissance (Don Paul Abbott), (4) The Eighteenth Century (Linda Ferreira-Buckley), (5) The Nineteenth Century (Lynée Lewis Gaillet), and (6) The Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries (Krista Ratcliffe). Each section describes related scholarship and references to significant works particularly those updated editions and more recent publications with accompanying bibliographies. Then there is background on contributors and helpful Indexes on authors, rhetors and major themes. Some of my favorite aspects related to the initial emergence of rhetoric (and other elements of the classic trivium----grammar and dialectic or logic) in ancient Greece, and the changes in its character and emphasis in other eras that seem to help confirm and supplement my findings from other sources (e.g. see my reviews of McNeely and Wolverton's "Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet and the McLuhans' "Theories of Communication"). However, the fracturing and inability to bridge divisions related to different forms of oral and written rhetoric referred to in the Preface is not really addressed explicitly as the text proceeds, but the lack of attention to these circumstances in the twentieth and twenty first centuries is particularly disappointing. Some references that might be considered in future editions such as in a survey of speech communication, business presentations, and literature connections might include those suggested in Valenzano, Wallace, and Morreale (i.e. the 2014 article "Consistency and Change: The (R)Evolution of the Basic Communication Course"), Heath and Heath "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" (2007, see my review), and Scholes’s “English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality” (2011). The inclusions of charts and diagrams such as one by Mandy Brooks and Katelyn Stark on “Re-establish the Study of Rhetoric” in Prezi.com would also be a helpful enhancement. Even with my criticism, this book is a no doubt a valuable resource for scholars in rhetoric studies and could become more so for those in different related fields and popularly as future editions bring together and address these disparate aspects more deliberately.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-27 00:00:00 arthur owyoung Now I know everything.