The Rhetorical Invention Of Man

This book draws attention to the logical contradictions, unstable premises, and unquestioned assumptions that underlie arguments about Man’s distinction, while also demonstrating that the way we think about nonhuman animals is only one possibility among many. Vestiges of older ways of thinking continue to inform our understanding of the human-nonhuman animal relationship, disturbing the simple narrative that Man has mastered nature. The reader will additionally find here a history that illuminates popular attitudes toward nature as well as intellectual traditions about the relationship between Man and other animals. As a result, each chapter is an overview of how the past continues to inform the present. The chapters, then, move back and forth between ancient ideas like the myths of Prometheus and Orpheus, Age of Reason philosophers like Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant and modern practices like petkeeping and vivisection.

This exceptional collection of writings offers for the first time a discussion among leading thinkers about the points at which rhetoric and religion illuminate and challenge each other. The contributors to the volume are eminent theorists and critics in rhetoric, theology, and religion, and they address a variety of problems and periods. Together these writings shed light on religion as a human quest and rhetoric as the origin and sustainer of that quest. They show that when pursued with intelligence and sensitivity, rhetorical approaches to religion are capable of revitalizing both language and experience. Rhetorical figures, for example, constitute forms of language that say what cannot be said in any other way, and that move individuals toward religious truths that cannot be known in any other way. When firmly placed within religious, social, and literary history, the convergence of rhetoric and religion brings into focus crucial issues in several fields--including philosophy, psychology, history, and art--and interprets relations among self, language, and world that are central to both past and present cultures.

Rhetorical invention--the discursive art of inquiry and discovery--has great significance in the history of spoken and written communication, dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Yet invention has received relatively little attention in recent discussions of rhetoric, writing, and communication. This collection of essays is the first book in years to focus on current research in rhetorical invention. The contributors include many well-established scholars, as well as new voices in the field. They reflect a variety of approaches and perspectives: theory, history, culture, politics, institutions, pedagogy, and community service. Several of the essays address the relationship between invention and postmodernism--some by refiguring invention, others by challenging postmodernism. Still other essays explore multicultural conceptions of invention, the civic function of invention and rhetoric, and the role of rhetorical invention in institutions and in comunity problem solving. Taken together, these essays provide a much-needed forum for ongoing study of rhetorical invention within the framework of recent developments in both scholarship and the culture at large. "If inventional research is to continue and flourish," notes Janice Lauer in her foreword, "it must remain sensitive to shifts in epistemology, ethics, and politics. The essays in this volume undertake this effort.." The Editors: Janet M. Atwill is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee. The author of Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition and coauthor of Four Worlds of Writing: Inquiry and Action in Context and Writing: A College Handbook, she has published articles in Rhetoric Review, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, and the Journal of Advanced Composition. Janice M. Lauer is Reece McGee Distinguished Professor of English at Purdue University, where she founded, directed, and teaches in the graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition. She is coauthor of Four Worlds of Writing and Composition Research: Empirical Designs and has published numerous articles on rhetoric and composition. Contributors: Frederick J. Antczak, Janet M. Atwill, Julia Deems, Richard Leo Enos, Theresa Enos, Linda Flower, Debra Hawhee, Janice M. Lauer, Donald Lazere, Yameng Liu, Arabella Lyon, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Jay Satterfield, Haixia Wang, Mark T. Williams.

For this edited volume, the editors solicited chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our "brute roots." In other words, this book investigates themes that enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. The present book is unique in its focus on the call for nonanthropocentrism in rhetorical studies. Although there have been many hints in recent years that rhetoric is beginning to consider the implications of the animal turn, as yet no other anthology makes this its explicit starting point and sustained objective. Thus, the various contributions to this book promise to further the ongoing debate about what rhetoric might be after it sheds its long-standing humanistic bias.

Why did deconstruction emerge when it did? Why did commentators in literary studies seem to need to look back on it from the earliest moments of its emergence? This book argues that the invention of deconstruction was spread across several decades, conducted by many people, and focused on its two central figures, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.

Invention in Rhetoric and Composition examines issues that have surrounded historical and contemporary theories and pedagogies of rhetorical invention, citing a wide array of positions on these issues in both primary rhetorical texts and secondary interpretations. It presents theoretical disagreements over the nature, purpose, and epistemology of invention and pedagogical debates over such issues as the relative importance of art, talent, imitation, and practice in teaching discourse. After a discussion of treatments of invention from the Sophists to the nineteenth century, Invention in Rhetoric and Composition introduces a range of early twentieth-century multidisciplinary theories and calls for invention's awakening in the field of English studies. It then showcases inventional theories and pedagogies that have emerged in the field of Rhetoric and Composition over the last four decades, including the ensuing research, critiques, and implementations of this inventional work. As a reference guide, the text offers a glossary of terms, an annotated bibliography of selected texts, and an extensive bibliography. Janice M. Lauer is Professor of English, Emerita at Purdue University, where she was the Reece McGee Distinguished Professor of English. In 1998, she received the College Composition and Communication Conference's Exemplar Award. Her publications include Four Worlds of Writing: Inquiry and Action in Context, Composition Research: Empirical Designs, and New Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, as well as essays on rhetorical invention, disciplinarity, writing as inquiry, composition pedagogy, historical rhetoric, and empirical research.

We have only recently started to challenge the notion that "serious" inquiry can be free of rhetoric, that it can rely exclusively on "hard" fact and "cold" logic in support of its claims. Increasingly, scholars are shifting their attention from methods of proof to the heuristic methods of debate and discussion—the art of rhetoric—to examine how scholarly discourse is shaped by tropes and figures, by the naming and framing of issues, and by the need to adapt arguments to ends, audiences, and circumstances. Herbert W. Simons and the contributors to this important collection of essays provide impressive evidence that the new movement referred to as the rhetorical turn offers a rigorous way to look within and across the disciplines. The Rhetorical Turn moves from biology to politics via excursions into the rhetorics of psychoanalysis, decision science, and conversational analysis. Topics explored include how rhetorical invention guides scientific invention, how rhetoric assists political judgment, and how it integrates varying approaches to meta-theory. Concluding with four philosophical essays, this volume of case studies demonstrates how the inventive and persuasive dimensions of scholarly discourse point the way to forms of argument appropriate to our postmodern age.

Examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women's health.