Now Don T Try To Reason With Me

In this entertaining collection of essays, Wayne Booth looks for the much-maligned “middle ground” for reason—a rhetoric that can unite truths of the heart with truths of the head and allow us all to discover shared convictions in mutual inquiry. First delivered as lectures in the 1960s, when Booth was a professor at Earlham College and the University of Chicago, Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me still resounds with anyone struggling for consensus in a world of us versus them. “Professor Booth’s earnestness is graced by wit, irony, and generous humor.”—Louis Coxe, New Republic

This is an examination of the principle works of Anglo-American novel criticism, defining the values, method and concepts that these works have in common and advancing a defence of Anglo-American humanistic criticism and the ideas proposed by Structuralism, Marxism and deconstruction.

The story of twentieth-century literary criticism can be told as a story about methodological anxieties: anxieties fostered by the success of the sciences and enacted by critics who have tried to set the study of literary texts on a more scientific basis. At the macrostructural level were taxonomists: Northrop Frye attempted to locate literature's conceptual center and organize Ptolemaic satellite myths around it, inferring the existence of literature from the possibility of criticism. linguistic microstructure, seeking (and finding) unsuspected levels of complexity, first in Baudelaire and Shakespeare, then in lesser poets, then in advertising slogans. After the collapse of the structuralist project, calls for the scientization of literary study have increasingly come from outside the humanities, where, despairing of criticism's native efforts, cognitive scientists and

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Articles, speeches, and journal entries challenge popular notions about the teaching of English, rhetoric, and what a liberal education can be.

Organs for Sale is a study of the bioethical question of how to increase human organ supply. But it is also an inquiry into public moral deliberation and the relationship between economic worth and the value systems of a society. Looking closely at human organ procurement debates, the author offers a critique of neoliberalism in bioethics and asks what kind of society we truly want. While society has shown concern over debates surrounding organ procurement, a better understanding of the rhetoric of advocates and philosophical underpinnings of the debate might indeed improve our public moral deliberation in general and organ policy more specifically. Examining public arguments, this book uses a range of source material, from medical journals to congressional hearings to newspaper op-eds, to provide the most up-to-date and thorough analysis of the topic. Organs for Sale posits that deciding together on the limits of markets, and on what is and ought to be for sale, sheds light on the moral fibre of our society and what it needs to thrive.

A cultural history of the origins of composition studies that sheds new light on contemporary debates regarding the role of rhetoric in student transformation.

Michael Kochin’s radical exploration of rhetoric is built around five fundamental concepts that illuminate how rhetoric functions in the public sphere. To speak persuasively is to bring new things into existence—to create a political movement out of a crowd, or an army out of a mob. Five Chapters on Rhetoric explores our path to things through our judgments of character and action. It shows how speech and writing are used to defend the fabric of social life from things or facts. Finally, Kochin shows how the art of rhetoric aids us in clarifying things when we speak to communicate, and helps protect us from their terrible clarity when we speak to maintain our connections to others. Kochin weaves together rhetorical criticism, classical rhetoric, science studies, public relations, and political communication into a compelling overview both of persuasive strategies in contemporary politics and of the nature and scope of rhetorical studies.