The Ends of rhetoric

The discipline of rhetoric - adapted through a wide range of reformulations to the specific requirements of Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance societies - dominated European education and discourse, whether public or private, for more than two thousand years. The end of classical rhetoric's domination was brought about by a combination of social and cultural transformations that occured between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Concurrent with the 'theory boom' of recent decades, rhetoric has appeared as a center of discussion in the humanities and social sciences. Rhetorical inquiry, as it is thought and practiced today, occurs in an interdisciplinary matrix that touches on philosophy, linguistics, communication studies, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, and political theory. Rhetoric is now an area of study without accepted certainties, a territory not yet parceled into topical subdivisions, a mode of discourse that adheres to no fixed protocols. It is a noisy field in the cybernetic sense of the term: a fertile ground for creative innovation. His volume embodies the interdisciplinary character of rhetoric. The essays draw on wide-ranging co