202 LOtJIS A.

RENZA

SUGGESTED READINGS 15
Bate, W. Jackson. 1970. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet.
Bloom, Harold. 1973. TheAnxiety oflnfluence.
1975a. Kabbalali and Criticism.
Rhetoric
1975b. A Map ofMisreading.
1976. Poetry andRepression.
1989. Ruin the Sacred Truths.
Stanley Fish
de Man, Paul. 1983. "Review ofAnxiety oflnfluence."
Hartman, Geoffrey H. "War m Heaven."
Highet, Gilbert. 1957. The Classical Tra4ition.
Kolodny, Annette. 1980. "A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpre-
tation of Literary Texts."
Leitch, Vincent B. 1983. Deconstructive Criticism. up rose
Lentricchia, Frank. 1980. After the Neiv Criticism. Belial, in act more graceful and humane;
A fairer person lost not Heav'n; he seem'd
For dignity compos'd and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;.
yet he pleas'd the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began.
(ParadiseLost, II, 108-15, 117-18)

F OR Milton's seventeenth-century readers this passage would have been im-

mediately recognizable as a brief but trenchant essay on the art and char-
acter of the rhetorician. Indeed in these few unes Milton has managed to gather
and restate with great rhetorical force ali of the traditional arguments against
rhetoric. Even Beial's gesture of rising is to the (negative) pomt: he catches the
eye even before he begins to speak, just as Satan will in Book IX when he too
raises himself and moved so that "each part,/Motion, each act won audience ere
the tongue" (673-74). That is, he draws attention to bis appearance, to his sur-
face, and the suggestion of superficiality (a word to be understood in its literal
meaning) extends to the word "act"; i.e., that which can be seen. That act is said
to be "graceful' the first in a succession of double meanings (one of the stigma-
tized attributes of rhetorical speech) we find in the passage. Belial is precisely not
fuJi ofgrace; that is simply his outward aspect, and the same is true for "humane"
and "fairer." The verses judgment on all of his apparent virtues is delivered in
the last two words of une 110—"he seem'd"—and the shadow of "seeming"
falis across the next lime which in isolation might "seem" to be high praise. But
under tite pressure of what precedes it, the assertion of praise undoes itselfwith 203
204 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 205

every Janus-faced word (the verse now begins to imitate the object of its criti- 1 have lingered so long over this passage because we can extrapolate from it
cism by displaying a pervasive disjunction between its outer and inner meanings; almost all of thebinary oppositions in relation to which rhetoric has received
indicting seeming, it itseW repeatedly seems): "compos'd" now carnes its pejo- its (largely negative) definition: inner/outer, deep/surface, essentiallperipheral,
rative meaning of "affected" or "made-up"; "high" at once refers to the favored unmediatedlmediated, clear/colored, necessary/contingent, straightforwardl
style ofbombastic orators and awaits its ironic and demeaning contrast with the angled, abiding/fleeting, reasonlpassion, things/words, realities/illusions, fact/
lowness ofhis thoughts; "dignity" is an etymological joke, for Belial is anything opinion, neutral/partisan. Underlying this list, which is by no means exhaustive,
but worthy; in fact, he is just what the next lime says he is, "false and hollow," an are three basic oppositions: first, between a truth that exists independently of al
accusation that repeats one of the perennial antirhetorical topo¡, that rhetoric, perspectives and points of view and the many truths that emerge and seem per-
the art of fine speaking, is aH show, grounded in nothing but its own empty spicuous when a particular perspective or point ofview has been established and
pretensions, unsupported by any relation to truth. "There is no need' declares is in force; second, am opposition between true knowledge, which is knowledge
Socrates in Platos Gorgias, "for rhetoric to know the facts at all, for it has hit as it exists apart from any and al systems of beief, and the knowledge, which
upon a means ofpersuasion that enables it to appear in the eyes ofthe ignorant because it fiows from sorne or other system of beief, is incomplete and partial
to know more than those who really know" (459), and in the Phaedrus the titie ( in the sense ofbiased); and third, an opposition between a selfor consciousness
figure admits that the "man who plans to be an orator" need not "learn what is that is turned outward in an effort to apprehend and attach itself to truth and
really just and true, but only what seems so to the crowd" (260). true knowledge, and a seWor consciousness that is turned inward in the direction
This reference to the vulgar popular ear indicates that rhetoric's deficiencies of its own prejudices, which far from being transcended, continue to inform its
are not only epistemological (sundered from truth and fact) and moral (sun- every word and action. Each of these oppositions is attached in turn to an op-
dered from true knowledge and sincerity) but social: it panders to the worst in position between two kinds oflanguage: on the one hand, language that faith-
people and moves them to base actions, exactly as Beial is said to do in the next fiilly refiects or reports on matters of fact uncolored by any personal or partisan
famous run-on statement, "and could make the worse appear/The better reason." agenda or desire; and on the other hand, language that is infected by partisan
Behind Belial is the lime of sophists—Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias, shadowy agendas and desires, and therefore colors and distorts the facts which it purports
figures known to us mostly through the writings of Plato where they appear to reflect. It is use of the second kind oflanguage that makes one a rhetorician,
always as relativist foils for the idealistic Socrates. The judgment made on them while adherence to the first kind makes one a seeker after truth and am objective
by a philosophic tradition dominated by Plato is the judgment here made on observer of the way things are.
Belial; their thoughts were low, centered on the suspect skills they taught for It is this understanding of linguistic possibilities and dangers that generates a
hire; the danger they represented is the danger Belial represents: despite the low- succession offforts to construct a language from which al perspectival bias (a
ness of their thoughts, perhaps because of the lowness of their thoughts, they redundant phrase) has been eliminated, efforts that have sometimes taken as a
pleased the ear, at least the ear of the promiscuous crowd (there is always just model the notations of mathematics, at other times the operations of logic, and
beneath the surface of the antirhetorical stance a powerful and corrosive elitism), more recently the purely formal calculations of a digital computer. Whether it
and the explanation of their unfortunate success is the power Belial now begins issues in the elaborate linguistic machines of seventeenth-century "projectors"
to exercise, the power of "persuasive accent." "Accent" here is a resonant word, like Bishop Wilkins (An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosaphical Lan-
one of whose relevant meanings is "mode of utrerance peculiar to an individual, guage, 1668), or in the building (á la Chomsky) of a "competence" model of
locality or nation" (OED). He who speaks "in accent" speaks from a particular language abstracted from any particular performance, or in the project of Esper-
angled perspective into which he tries to draw his auditors; he also speaks in the anto or sorne other artificial language clainiing universality (see Large 1985), or
rhythms of song (etymologically "accent" means "song added to speech") which in the fashioning of a Habermasian "ideal speech situation" in which al asser-
as Milton will soon observe "charms the sense" (II, 556). "Persuasive accent" tions express "a 'rational will' in relation to a common interest ascertained with-
then is almost a redundancy: the two words mean the same thing and what they out deceprion" (Habermas 1975, 108), the impulse behind the effort is always
tel the reader is that he is about to be exposed to a force whose exercise is uncon- the same: to establish a forrn of communication that escapes partiality and aids
strained by any sense of responsibility either to the Truth or to the Good. In- us in first determining and then affirrning what is absolutely and objectively true,
deed, so dangerous does Milton consider this force that he feels it necessary to a form of communication that in its structure and operations is the very antithe-
provide a corrective gloss as soon as Belial stops speaking: "Thus Belial with sis of rhetoric.
words cloth'd in reason's garb/Counsell'd ignoble case and peaceful sloth" (II, Although the transition from classical to Christian thought is marked by many
226-27). Just in case you hadn't noticed. changes, one thing that does not change is the status of rhetoric in relation to a
206 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 207

foundational vision of truth and meaning. Whether the center of that vision is a To the accusation that rhetoric deals only with the realms ofthe probable and
personalizcd deity or an abstract geometric reason, rhetoric is the force that pulls contingent and forsake truth, the Sophists and tbeir successors respond that
us away from that center and into its own world of ever-shiftmg shapes and iruth itself is a contingent affair and assumes a different shape in the light of
shirnmering surfaces. differing local urgencies and the convictions associated with them. "Trutb was
The quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric survives every sea change in thc individual and temporary, not universal and lasting, for the truth for any man
history of Westem thought, continually presenting us with the (skewed) choice was . . . what he could be persuaded of" (Guthrie 1971, 193). Not only does
between the plain unvarnished truth straightforwardly presented and the pow - this make rhetoric—the art ofanalyzing and presenting local exigehcies—a form
erful but insidious appeal of "fine language' language that has transgressed the of discourse no one can afford to ignore, it renders the opposing discourse-
limits of representation and substituted its own forms for the forms of reality formal philosophy—irrelevant and beside the point. Tbis is precisely Isocrates'
(see Kennedy 1963, 23). thesis in hisAntidosis. Abstract studies like geometry and astronomy, he says, do
not have any "useful application either to prívate or public affairs; . . . after they
are learned . . . they do not attend as through life nor do they lend aid in what
II
we do, but are wholly divorced from our necessities" (Isocrates 1962, 2:261—
To this point my presentation has been as lkewed as this choice, because it has 62).
suggested that rhetoric has received only negative characterizations. In fact, What Isocrates does (at least rhetorically) is shift tite balance of power be-
there have always been friends ofrhetoric, from the Sophists to the antifounda- tween philosophy and rhetoric by putting philosophy on the defensive. This
tionalists of the present day, and in response to the realist critique they have same strategy is pursued after him by Cicero and Quintilian, the most influential
devised (and repeated) a number of standard defenses. Two of these defenses are of the Roman rhetoricians. In the opening pages of bis De Inventione Cicero
offered by Aristotie in the Rhetoric. First, he defines rhetoric as a faculty or art elaborates the myth that will subsequently be invoked in every defense of hu-
whose practice will help us to observe "in any given case the available means of manism and beles lettres. There was a time, he says, when "men wandered at
persuasion" (1355b) and points out that as a faculty is it not in and of itself large in the field like animals" and there was "as yet no ordered system of rei-
inclined away from truth. Of course, bad men may abuse it, but that, after all, "is gious worsbip nor of social duties" (Cicero, 1:2). It was then that a "great and
a charge which may be made in common against all good things." "What makes wise" man "assembled and gathered" his uncivilized brothers and "introduced
a man a 'sophist," he declares, "is not bis faculty, but bis moral purpose." them to every useful and honorable occupation, though they cried out against it
Aristotle's 'second defense is more aggressively positive and responds directly at first because of its novelty" Nevertheless, he gained their artention through
to one of the most damaging characterizations of rhetoric: "We must be able to "reason and eloquence" (propter ratwnem atque oratwnem) and by diese means
employ persuasion.. . on opposite sides of a question, not in order that we may he "transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentie folk." From that
in practice employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is time on, "many cities have been founded,. . . dic fiames of a multitude of wars
wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are" (1355a). In have been extinguished, and... the strongest alliances and most sacred friend-
short, properly used, rhetoric is a heuristic, helping us not to distort the facts ships have been formed not only by dic use of reason, but also more easily by the
but to discover them; the setting forth of contrary views of a matter will have use of eloquence" (1:1). Whereas in the foundationaist story an original purity
the beneficial effect of showing us which of those vie'ws most accords with the (of vision, purpose, procedure) is corrupted when rhetoric's siren song proves
truth. By this argument, as Peter Dixon has pointed out (1971, 14), Aristotle too sweet, in Cicero's story (later to be echoed by counticss others) (see, for
"removes rhetoric from the realm of the haphazard and the fanciful" and rejoins example, Lawson 1972, 27) alfl the human virtues, and indeed humanity itself,
it to that very realm of which it was said to be the great subverter. are wrested by the arts of eloquence from a primitive and violent state of narure.
But if this is the strength of Aristotle's defense, it is also its weakness, for in Significantly (and this is a point to which wc shall return), both stories are sto-
making it he reinforces the very assumptions in relation to which rhetoric will ries of power, rhetoric's power; it is just that in one story that power must be
always be suspect, assumptions of an independent reality whose outlines can be resisted lest civilization fail, while in the other that power brings order and a
perceived by a sufficiently clear-eyed observer who can then represent them in a genuine political process where before diere was only dic rule of "physical
transparent verbal medium. The stronger defense, because it bits at the heart of strength."
the opposing tradition, is one that embraces the accusations of that tradition and The contrast between dic two stories can hardly be exaggerated bccause what
makes of them a claim. is at stake is not simply a matter of emphasis or priority (as it seems to be in
208 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 209

Aristotle's effort to demonstrate an alliance between rhetoric and truth) but a folding of rhe thearre of seriousness, are themselves insrances of what rhey op-
difference in worldviews. The quarrel between rhetorical and foundational pose. And on rhe orher side ifserious man were ro here that argumenr, he would
thought is itself foundational; its content is a disagreement about the basic con- regard ir as one more example ofrheorical manipulation and sleighr ofhand, an
stituents of human activity and about the nature of human nature itself. In Rich- ourrageous assertion that flies in rhe face of common sense, rhe equivalenr in
ard Lanham's helpful terms, it is a disagreement as to whether we are members debate of "so's your oid man." And so ir would go, with no prospect of ever
of the species horno seriosus or horno rhetoricu5. Horno seriosus or serious man
reaching accord, an endless round of accusarion and counreraccusarion in which
rurrh, honesry, and linguistic responsibiliry are claimed by everyone: "from ser¡-
possesses a central seW, an irreducible identity. These selves com- premises, all rherorical languge is suspect; from a rherorical poinr of view,
bine into a single, homogeneously real society which constitutes a transparenr language seems dishonesr, false ro the world" (Lanham 1976,28).
referent reality for the men living in it. This referent society is in And so ir has gone; the hisrory of Wesrem thoughr could be written as rhe
turn contained in a physical narure itseWreferential, standing "out hisrory of this quarrel. And indeed such histories have been wrirren and wirh
there" independent of man. predicrably differenr emphases. In one version wrirten many rimes, the misrs of
reigion, magic, and verbal incanration (all equivalently suspect forms of fantasy)
Horno rhetorzeus or rhetorical man, on the other hand, are dispelled by rhe Enlighrenment rediscovery of reason and science; enrhusi-
asm and metaphor alike are curbed by rhe reflnemenr of merhod, and rhe effecrs
is an actor; bis reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity de- of difference (poinr of view) are brackered and heid in check by a procedural
pends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment. . The
..
rigor. In another version (toid by a une srrerching from Vico ro Foucaulr) a
lowest common denominator of bis life is a social situation.... carnivalesque world of exuberance and possibility is drastically impoverished by
He is thus committed to no single construction of the world;
much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand.... Rhetorical rhe ascendancy of a soulless reason, a brurally narrow perspective rhar claims ro
man is trained not to discover realiry bur to manipulare it. Reality be objective and proceeds in a repressive manner to enforce its claim. Ir is flor
is what is accepted as reality, what is useful (Lanham 1976, 1, 4). my intenrion here ro endorse eirher hisrory or ro offer a third one or ro argue as
some have for a nonhisrory of disconrinuous episterne innocenr of either a pro-
As rhetorical man manipulares realiry, esrablishing through bis words the imper- gressive or lapsarian curve; lonly wish ro poinr out rhar rhe debate conrinues ro
atives and urgencies ro which he and bis fellows musr respond, he manipulares rhis very day and rhar irs rerms are exactly rhose one finds in rhe dialogues of
or fabricares bimseW, simulraneously conceiving of and occupying rhe roles thar Plato and the orarions of the Sophisrs.
become firsr possible and then mandarory given the social strucrure bis rheroric III
has pur in place. By exploring rhe available means of persuasion in a particular
situarion, he rries rhem on, and as they begin to suit bim, he becomes rhem (see As 1 wrire, rhe fornmes of rherorical man are on rhe upswing, as in discipline
Sloane 1985, 87: "Rheroric succeeded in humanism's great desiderarum, the after discipline there is evidence of what has been cailed rhe inrerprerive rurn,
artistic crearion of adept personhood"; see also Greenblatr 1980). What serious the realization (ar least for rhose it seizes) rhat rhe givens of any fleid of activ-
man fears—rhe invasion of the forrress of essence by rhe conringenr, rhe prorean iry—including the facts ir commands, the procedures ir trusts in, and the values
and the unpredicrable—is whar rhetorical man celebrares and incarnares. ir expresses and extends—are socially and polirically consrructed, are fashioned
Which of rhese views of human narure is the correcr one? The quesrion can be by man rarher rhan delivered by God or NatureThe mosr recenr (and unlike!y)
answered only from wirhin one or the other, and the evidence of one party will fleid to experience rhis revolution, or ar leasr ro hear of irs possibiliry, is &onom-
be regarded by rhe orher either as illusory or as grisr for its own mill. When ics. The key rexr is Donald McCloskey's TheRhetoric of Econornies (1985), a tirle
presented with rhe ever-changing panorama of hisrory, serious man will see var- that is irself polemical since, as McCloskey poinrs out, mainsrream econoniisrs
iation on a few basic rhemes; and when confronred wirh the persistence of essen- don'r like ro rhink of rhemselves as employing a rhetoric; rarher rhey regard
tialisr questions and answers, rherorical man will reply as Lanham does by assert- themse!ves as scientisrs whose methodology insulares rhem from the appeal of
ing tbar serious man is himself a supremely ficrional achievemenr; seriousness is special inreresrs or poinrs of view. They think, in orher words, thar rhe proce-
just another style, flor the srate of having escaped sryle. Thar is ro say, for rhetor- dures of their discipline will produce "knowledge free from doubr, free from
ical man rhe disrinctions (berween form and content, periphery and core, metaphysics, morals, and personal conviction" (16). To this McCloskey re-
ephemeral and abiding) invoked by serious man are nothing more than the scaf- sponds by declaring (in good sophistic rerms) rhat no such knowledge is avail-
210 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 211

able, and that while economic method promises to deliver it, "what it is able to Kuhn challenges this story by introducing the notion of a paradigm, a set of
deliver [and] renames as scientiflc methodology [are] the scientist's and espe- tacit assumptions and beliefs within which research goes on, assumptions which
cially the economic scientist's metaphysics, morais, and personal convictions" rather than deriving from the observation of facts are determinative of the facts
(16). Impersonal method then is both an illusion and a danger (as a kind of that could possibly be observed. It follows then that when observations made
rhetoric it masks its rhetorical nature), and as an antidote to it McCloskey offers within di&rent paradigms conílict, there is no principled (i.e., nonrhetorical)
rhetoric, which he says, deals not with abstract truth, but with the truth that way to adjudicate the dispute. One cannot put the competing accounts to the
emerges in the context of distinctly human conversations (28-29). Within those test of fact, because the specification of fact is precisely what is at issue between
conversations, there are always them; a fact cited by one parry would be seen as a mistake by the other. What
this means is that science does not proceed by offering its descriptions to the
particular arguments good or bad. After making them there is no
independent judgment of nature; rather it proceeds when the proponents of one
point in asking a last, summarizing question: "Well, is it True?"
It's whatever it is—persuasive, interesting, useful, and so paradigm are able to present their case in a way that the adherents of other para-
forth. . . . There is no reason to search for a general quality called digms find compelling. In short, the "motor" by which science moves is not
Truth, which answers only the unanswerable question, "What is it verificanon or falsiflcation, but persuasion. In the case of disagreement, "each
in the mmd of God?" (47) party must ny, by persuasion, to convert the other" (198), and when one party
succeeds there is no higher court to which the outcome might be referred: "there
The real truth, concludes McCloskey, is that "assertions are made for purposes is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant communiry" (94). "What
of persuading sorne audience" and that given the unavailabiliry of a God's-eye better criterion," asks Kuhn, "could there be?" (170).
view, "this is not a shameful fact" but the bottom-line fact in a rhetorical world. The answer given by those who were horrified by Kuhn's rhetoricization of
At the first conference called to consider McCloskey's arguments, the familiar scientffic procedure was predictable: a better criterion would be one that was not
antirhetorical objections were heard again in the land and the land might have captive to a particular paradigm but provided a neutral space in which compet-
been fifth-century B.C. Athens as well as Wellesley, Massachussets, in 1986. One ing paradigms could be disinterestedly assessed. By denying such a criterion,
participant spoke of"the primrose path to extreme relativism?' Other voices pro- Kuhn leaves us in a world of epistemological and moral anarchy. The words are
claimed that nothing in McCloskey's position was new (an observation certainly Israel Scheffier's:
true), that everyone already knew it, and that at any rate it didn't touch the core
Independent and public controls are no more, communication has
of the economists' practice. Still others invoked a set of related (and familiar)
failed, the common universe of things is a delusion, reality itseWis
distinctions between empirical and interpretive activities, between demonstra- made... rather than discovered. . . . In place of a community of
tion ánd persuasion, between veriflable procedures and anarchic irrationalism. rational men following objective procedures in the pursuit of
Of course, each of these objections had already been formulated (or reformu- truth, WC have a set of isolated rnonads, within each of which be-
lated) in those disciplines that had heard rhetoric's siren song long before it liefforrns without systematic constraints. (19)
reached the belated ears of economists. The name that everyone always refers to
(in praise or blame) is Thomas Kuhn. His The Structure of Scientfic Revolutions Kulin and those he has persuaded have, of course, responded to these accusa-
(1962) is arguably the most frequently cited work in the humanities and social tions, but needless to say, the debate continues in terms readers of tbis essay
sciences in the past twenty-five years, and it is rhetoncal through and through. could easily imagine; and the debate has been particularly acrimonious because
Kuhn begins by rehearsing and challenging the orthodox model of scientific in- the area of contest—science and its procedures—is so heavily invested-in as the
quiry in which independent facts are flrst collected by objective methods and one place where the aposties of rhetorical interpretivism would presumably fear
then built up into a picture of nature, a picture that nature herseWeither conflrms to tread.
or rejects in the context of controlled experiments. In this model, science is a At one point in his argumçnt, Kuhn remarks that, in the tradition he is criti-
"cumulative process" (3) in which each new discovery adds "one more item to quing, scientiflc research is "reputed to proceed" from "raw data" or "brute ex-
the population of the scientist's world" (7). The shape of that world—of the perience"; but, he points out, ifthat were truly the mode of proceeding, it would
scientist's professional activities—is determined by the shapes (of fact and struc- require a "neutral observation language" (125), a language that registers facts
ture) already existing in the larger world of nature, shapes that constrain and without any mediation by paradigm-speciflc assumptions. The problem is that
guide the scientist's work. "philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language
212 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 213

able to do that would be like" (127). Even a specially devised language "embod- gent and cannot be formally constrained—that is responsible for rheir being
ies a host of expectations about narure" expectations that limit m advance what consigned by philosophers of language to the category of the "derived"
can be described. Just as one cannot (m Kuhn's view) have recourse to neutral or "parasitic," where, safely tucked away, rhey are prevenred from contaminaring
facts in order to settle a dispute, so one cannot have recourse to a neutral lan- rhe core category ofthe constative. But ir is rhis act ofsegregarion and quaran-
guage in which to report those facts or even to report on the configuration of tining that Austin undoes in the second haif of his book when he extends the
the dispute. Whatever reports a particular language (natural or artificial) offers analysis of performatives to constatives and finds rhat rhey roo mean differently
us will be the report on the world as it is seen from within sorne particular sim- in the light of differing contextual circumstances. Consider the exemplary con-
ation; there is no other aperspectival way to see and no language other than a stative, "Lord Raglan won the barde of Alma." Is it true, accurate, a faithful
situation-dependent language—an mterested, rhetorical language—in which to report? It depends, says Austin, on the context in which it is uttered and received
report. (142-43). In a high-school textbook, it might be accepted as true because of the
This same point was bemg made with all the force of philosophical authority in-place assumptions as to what, exactly, a battle is, what constirutes winning,
by J. L. Austin in a book published, significantly, m the sarne year (1962) that what rhe function of a general is, etc., while in a work of "serious" historical
saw the publication of The Structure ofScientfic Revolutions. Austin begins How research aH of rhese assumptions may have been replaced by others, with rhe
to Do Things with Words by observing that traclitionally the center of the phios- result rhat the very notions "battle" and "won" would have a different shape.
ophy oflanguage has been just the kind ofutterance Kuhn declares unavailable, The properries that supposedly distinguish consratives from performatives—fi-
the context-independent staternent that offers objective reports on an equally delity ro preexisting facts, accountabiliry to a criterion ofrnith—tum out to be
independent world in sentences of the form "He is mnning" and "Lord Raglan as dependent on particular conditions of production and reception as performa-
won the battle ofAlma" (47, 142). Such utterances, which Austin calls "consta- tives. "True" and "false' Austin concludes, are not names for rhe possible rela-
tive' are answerable to a requirement of truth and verisimilirude ("the truth of rionships berween freestanding (consrative) urterances and an equally freesrand-
the constative ... 'he is mnning' depends on his being running"); the words ing state of affairs; rather they are siruarion-speciflc judgments on the
must match the world, and if they do not they can be criticized as false and relarionship between contextually produced utterances and states of affairs thar
inaccurate. There are, however, innumerable utterances that are not assessable in are themselves no less conrextually produced. Ar the end of rhe book consrativcs
this way. If, for example, 1 say ro you, "1 promise ro pay you five dollars" or are "discovered" to be a subset of performatives, and with rhis discovery the
'Leave the room' it would be odd were you ro respond by saying "true" or formal core of language disappears entirely and is replaced by a world of urter-
"false"; rather you would say to the first "good" or "that's not enough" or "1 ances vulnerable to rhe sea change of every circumstance—the world, in short,
won't hoid my breath" and to the second "yes, sir" or "but I'm expecting a phone of rhetorical (situated) man.
cali" or "who do you think you are?" These and many other imaginable re- This is a conclusion Austin himself resists when he atremprs ro isolare (and
sponses would not be judgments on the truth or accuracy of my urterance but rhereby conrain) rhe rhetorical by invoking another distincrion between serious
on its appropriateness given our respective positions in sorne social structure of and nonserious utrerance. Serious utrerances are utrerances for which the
understanding (domestic, military, economic, etc.). Thus the very identity, and speaker rakes responsibility; he means what he says, and therefore you can infer
therefore the meaning, of this type of utrerance—Austin names it "performa- bis meaning by considering his words in conrexr. A nonserious urrerance is an
tive"—depends on the context in which it is produced and received. Nothing urrerance produced in circumsrances rhat "abrogate" (21) rhe speaker's respon-
guarantees that "1 promise ro pay you five dollars" will be either intended or sibiliry, and rherefore one cannor with any coníidence—rhar is, wirhour the haz-
heard as a promise; in different circumsrances it could be received as a threat or ard of ungrounded conjecture—determine what he means:
a joke (as when 1 utrer it from debtor's prison) and in many circumstances it will a performative utterance will, for example, be. . . hollow or void
be intended as one act and undersrood as another (as when your opinion of my if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or
trustworthiness is much lower than my own). When rhe criterion of verisimili- spoken in a soliloquy.... Language in such circumstances is in
rude has been replaced by the criterion of appropriateness, meaning becomes special ways... used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its
radically contextual, potentially as variable as the situated (and shifting) under- normal use... . All this we are exduding from considerarion. Our
standings of countless speakers and hearers. performative urterances... are to be undersrood as issued in or-
It is, of course, precisely this property of performatives—their force is contin- dinary circumsrances. (22)
214 STAN LEY FISH RHETORIC 215

The distinction then is between uttcranccs that are, as Austin puts it later, "teth- challengeable point of view. The "citationality"—the condition of being in
. cred to their origm" (61), anchored by a palpable intention, and utterances quotes, of bcing indirect—of an utterance in a play is not dic same as dic cita-

> whose origin is hidden by the screen ofa theatrical or literary stage-setting. This
distinction and the passage in which it appears were taken up m 1967 by Jacques
Derrida in a famous (and admiring) critique of Austin. Derrida finds Austin
tionality ofa philosophical reference or a deposition before a comí; it is just that
no one of diese perforrnatives is more serious—more direct, less mediated, less
rhetorical—than any other.
working against his own best insights and forgetting what he has just acknowl- One recognizes in diese assertions dic familiar world of Rhetorical Man,
edged, that "infcicity [communication going astray, in an unintended direction] teeming with roles, situations, strategies, interventions, but containing no mas-
is an ill to which ah [speech] acts are heir" (Derrida 1977). Despite this ac- ter role, no situation of situations, no strategy for outflanking ali strategies, no
knowledgment, Austin continues to think of infeicity—of those cases in which intervention in dic arena of dispute that does not expand dic arena of dispute,
the tethering origin of utterances is obscure and must be constructed by in- no neutral point ofrationality from dic vantage point ofwhich dic "merely rhe-
terpretive conjecture—as special, whereas, in Derrida's view, infeicity is itself torical" can be identified and heid in check. Indeed deconstructive or poststruc-
the originary state in that any determination of meaning must always proceed turalist diought is in its operation a rhetorical machine: it systematically asserts
within an interpretive construction of a speaker's intention. In short, there are and demonstrates dic mediated, constructed, partial, socially constituted nature
no ordinary circumstaflCeS, merely those myriad and varied circumstances m of alI realities, whedier diey be phenomenal, linguistic, or psychological. To de-
which actors embedded in stage settmgs hazard interpretations of utterances construct a text, says Derrida, is to "work through dic structured gcnealogy of
produced by actors embedded in other stage situations. All the world, as Shake- its concepts in dic most scrupulous and immanent fashion, but at dic same time
speare says, is a stage, and on that stage "the quality of risk" admitted by Austin to determine from a certain externa! perspective diat it cannot name or describe
is not something one can avoid by sticking close to ordinary language m ordi- what diis history may have conccaled or exciuded, constituting itself as history
nary circumstances, but is rather "the internal and positive condition" of any act through diis repression in which it has a stake" (1981, 6). The "extemal perspcc-
ofcommunication (Derrida 1977, 190). Uve" is dic perspcctive from which dic analyst knows in advance (by virrue of his
In the same publication in which the English transiation of Derrida's essay comnutrnent to dic rhetorical or deconstructive worldview) that dic cohcrence
appeared, John Searle, a student of Austin's, replied in terrns that make clear the presented by a text (and an institution or an economy can in this sense be a text)
affiliation of this particular debate to the ancient debate whose conflgurations rests on a contradiction it cannot acknowledge, rests on dic suppression of dic
we have been tracing. Searle's strategy is basically to repeat Austin's points and challcngeable rhetoricity of its own standpoint. A deconstructive reading wili
declare that Derrida has missed them: "Austin's idea is simply this: ifwe want to sm-face diose contradictions and exposc those supprcssions and thus "troublc" a
know what it is to make a promise we had better not start our investigations unity diat is achieved only by covcring over all dic exciuded cmphases and intcr-
with promises made by actors on stage... because in sorne fairly obvious ways csts that might threaten it.
such utterances are not standard cases of promises" (Searle 1977, 204). But in Nor is this act performed in dic service of sornething beyond rhetoric. Derri-
Derrida's argument, the category of the "obvious" is precisely what is being chal- dean deconstruction does not uncover dic operations of rhetoric in order to
lenged or "deconstructed." Although it is true that we consider prornises uttered reach dic Trudi; radicr it continually uncovers dic truth of rhetorical operations,
in everyday contexts more direct—less etiolated—than promises made on a dic trudi diat all operations, including dic operation of deconstruction itsclf, are
stage, this (Derrida would say) is only because the stage settmgs within which rhetorical. If, as Paul de Man asserts, "a deconstruction always has for its targct
everyday life proceeds, are so powerfully—that is, rhetorically—in place that to rcvcal dic existcnce of hiddcn articulations and fragmentations within as-
they are in effect invisible, and therefore the meanings they make possible are sumedly monadic totalities' care must be takcn that a new monadic totality is
experienced as ifthey were direct and unmediated by any screens. The "obvious" not Ieft as dic legacy of dic deconstructive gesturc. Since dic course of a decon-
cannot be opposed to the "staged," as Searle assumes, because it is simply the struction isto uncover a "fragmcnted stage diat can be called natural widi regard
achievernent of a staging that has been particularly successful. One does not es- to dic system that is bcing undone," diere is always dic dangcr diat dic "natural"
cape the rhetorical by fleeing to the protected arca of basic cornmunication and pattern will "substitute its relational system for dic one it helped to dissolve" (de
cornmon sense because cornmon sense in whatever forrn it happens to take is Man 1979 1 249). The only way to escape this danger is to perform dic decon-
always a rhetorical—partial, partisan, interested—construction. This does not structive act again and again, submitting cach new emcrging constdilation to dic
mean, Derrida hastens to add, that all rhetorical constructions are equal, just that same suspicious scrutiny that brought itto light, and resistmg dic ternptation to
they are equally rhetorical, equally dic effects and extensions of sorne limited and put in place of dic truths it rhetoricizcs dic trudi diat evcrything is rhctorical.
216 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 217

One cannot rest even in the insight that there is no place to rest. The rhetorical an example the slogan "black is bcautiful" which he says is "paradigrnatically
beat must by definition go on, endlessly repeating the sequence by which "the rhetorical since it employs a figure of equivalence to produce particular discur-
lure of solid ground" is succeeded by "the ensumg demystification" (Ray 1984, sive and extra-discursive cffects without direct regard for truth" (112). That is,
195). When de Man approvingly quotes Nietzsche's identification of truth with someone who says "black is beautiful" is not so rnuch interested in the accuracy
"a moving army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms' a rhetor- of the assertion (it is not constatively intended) as he is in the responses it may
ical construction whose origin has be-en (and must be) forgotten, he does not provoke—surprise, outrage, urgency, solidarity—responses that may lii turn set
exempt Nietzsche's text from its own corrosive effects. "A text like On Truth and lii motion "practices that are deemed, in the light of a particular set of falsiflable
Lie, although it presents itselflegitimately as a demystification of literary rhetoric hypotheses, to be desirable" (113). This confidence in lis objectives makes Ea-
remains entirely literary, and deceptive itself" (113). The "rhetorical mode' the gleton impatient with those for whom the rhetoricity of all discourse is sorne-
mode of deconstruction, is a mode of"endless reflection," since it is "unable ever thing to be savored for itself, something to be lovingly and obsessively demon-
to escape from the rhetorical deceit it announces" (115). strated again and again. It is not, he says, "a matter of starting from certain
theoretical or rnethodological problerns; it is a matter ofstarting from what we
IV want to do, and then seeing which methods and theories will bcst help us to
That, however, is just what is wrong with deconstructive practice from the view- achieve these ends" (1983, 211). Theories, in short, are themselves rhetorics
point of the intellectual left, many of whose members subscribe to Nietzsche's whose usefulness is a function ofcontingent circumstances. It is ends—specific
account of tnith and reality as rhetorical, but find that ínuch of poststructuralist goals in local contexts—that rule dic invocation of theories, not theories that
discourse uses that account as a way of escaping into new versions of idealism determine goais and the rneans by which they can be reached.
and formalism. Frank Lentricchia, for example, sees in sorne ofde Man's texts an There are those on the left, however, for whorn the direction is the other way
intention to place "discourse in a realm where it can have no responsibility to around, from the theoretical realization of rhetoric's pervasiveness to a vision
historical life" and fears that we are being invited into "thc realm of the thor- and a prograrn for implementing it. In their view the discovery (or rediscovery)
oughly predictable linguistic transcendental' the "rarified region ofthe undecid- that all discourse and therefore ah knowledge is rhetorical leads, or should lead,
able' where every text "speaks synchronically and endlessly the same tale. . . of to the adoption of a method by which the dangers of rhetoric can be at least
its own duplicitous seW-consciousness" (1980, 310, 317). Terry Eagleton's judg- mitigated and perhaps extirpated. This method has two stages: the flrst is a stage
ment is even harsher. Notmg that in the wake of Nietzschean thought, rhetoric, of debunking, and it issues from the general suspicion in which all orthodoxies
"mocked and berated for centuries by an abrasive rationalism," takes its "terrible and arrangernents of power are held once it is reahized that their basis is not
belated revenge" by flnding itselfin every rationalist project, Eagleton cornplains reason or nature but the success ofsorne rhetoricahlpolitical agenda. Armed with
that many rhetoricians seem content to stop there, satisfled with the "Fool's this reahization one proceeds to expose the contingent and therefore challengea-
function of unmasking all power as self-rationalization, all knowledge as a mere ble basis of whatever presents itself as natural and inevitable. So fax this is pre-
furnbling with metaphor" (1981, 108). Operating as a "vigorous dernystifler of cisely the procedure of deconstruction; but whereas deconstructive practice (at
ali ideology," rhetoric functions only as a form of thought and ends up by pro- Ieast of the Yale variety) seems to produce nothing but the occasion for its end-
viding "the final ideological rationale for political inertia." In retreat "from mar - less repetition, sorne cultural revolutionaries discem in it a more posirive residue,
ket place to study, polirics to philology, social practice to semiotics" deconstruc- the loosening or weakening of the structures of domination and oppression that
tive rhetoric turns the emancipatory promise of Nietzschean thought into "a now hoid us captive. The reasoning is that by repeatedly uncovering the histori-
gross failure of ideological nerve," allowing the liberal academic the elitist pica- cal and ideological basis of established strucrures (both political and cognitive),
sure of repeatedlly exposing "vulgar commercial and political hectorings" (108- one becornes sensitized to the effects of ideology and begins to clear a space in
9). In both his study of Benjarnin and his influentiai Literary Theory: An Intro- which those effects can be combatted; and as that sensitivity grows more acute,
duction, Eagleton urges a return to the Ciceronian-Isocratic tradition in which the area of combat will become larger until it encompasses the underlying struc-
the rhetorical arts are inseparable frorn the practice of a polirics, "techniques of ture of assumptions that confers a spurious legitimacy on the powers that cur-
persuasion indissociable from the substantive issues and audiences involved," rentiy be. The claim, in short, is that the radically rhetorical insight of Nietz-
techniques whose employment is "closely determined by the pragmatic situation schean/Derridean thought can do radical political work; becoming aware that
at hand" (601). In short, he calls for a rhetoric that wili do real work and cites as ¡ everything is rhetorical is the flrst step in countering the power of rhetoric and
218 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 219

liberating us from its force. Only ifdeeply entrenched ways ofthinking are made would count except the claims to universal validity of aH assertions. "No force
the objects ofsuspicion will we be able "even to imagine that life could be differ - except that of the better argument is exercised; and . . . as a result, aH motives
ent and better." except that ofthe cooperative search for truth are exciuded" (1975, 107-8). Of
This last sentence is taken from an essay by Robert Gordon entitied "New course, in the world WC flOW inhabit, there is no such purity of motive, but
Developments in Legal Theory" (1982, 287). Gordon is writing as a member nevertheless, says Habermas, even in the most distorted ofcommunicative sim-
of the Critical Legal Studies movement, a group of legal academics who have ations there remains something of the basic impulse behind aH utterance, "the
discovered the rhetorical nature of legal reasoning and are busily exposing as intention ofcommunicating a true [wahr] proposition . . . so that the hearer can
interested dic supposedly dismterested operations oflegal procedures. Gordon's share the knowledge ofthe speaker" (1979, 2). Ifwe could only eliminate from
pages are replete with the vocabulary of enclosure or prison; we are "locked- our discourse-performances those intentions that reflect baser goals—the inten-
into" a system ofbeliefwe did not make; we are "demobilized" (that is, rendered tions to deceive, to manipulate, to persuade—the ideal speech situation could be
approximated.
less mobile); we must "break out" (291), we must "unfreeze the world as it
appears to common sense" (289). What will help us to break out, to unfreeze, is This is the project Habermas names "Universal Pragrnatics" and the name telis
the discovery "that the belief-structures that rule our lives are not found in na- its own story. Habermas recognizes, as aH modem and postmodern contextual-
ture but are historically contingent' for that discovery, says Gordon, "is extraor- ists do, that language is a social and not a purely formal phenomenon, but he
dinarily liberating" (289). To the question, what is the content of that liberation, thinks that the sociallpragmatic aspect oflanguage use is itself"accessible to for-
given a world that is rhetorical through and through, those who work Gordon's mal analysis" (6) and that therefore it is possible to construct a universal "com-
side ofthe street usually reply that emanciparion will take the form ofa strength- municative competence" (29) parallel to Chomsky's Iinguistic competence. Sen-
ening and enlarging ofa capacity ofmind that stands to the side of, and is there- tences produced according to the rules and norms of tbis communicative
fore able to resist, the appeal of the agenda that would ensiave us. That capacity competence would be tied not to "particular epistemic presuppositions and
of mmd has received many names, but the one most often proposed is "critical changing contexts" (29), but to the unchanging context (the context of con-
self-consciousness?' Critical self-consciousness is the ability (stifled m sorne, de- texts) un which
ofsuccessful one finds the presuppositions underlying the general possibility
speech.
veloped in others) to discern in any "scherne of association," including those one "Ageneral theory ofspeech acts would . . . describe . . . that
finds attractive and compelling, the partisan aims it hides from view; and the fundamental system ofmles that adult subjects master to the extent that they can
clairn is that as it performs this negative task critica¡ self-consciousness partici- fulfill the conditwns of happy employment ofsentences in utterances no matter to
pates in the positive task of forrnulating schernes of associations (structures of which particular language the sentences may belong and in which accidental
thought and government) that are in the service not of a particular party but of contexts the utterances may be ernbedded" (26). If we can operate on the level
all mankind. • ofthat fundamental system, the distorting potential of "accidental contexts" will
It need hardly be said that this claim veers back m the direction of the ratio- be neutralized because we will always have one eye on what is essential, the es-
nalisrn and universalism that the criticalldeconstructive project seis out to de- tablishing by rational cooperation of an interpersonal (nonaccidental) truth.
mystify. That project begins by rejecting the rationalities of present life as ration- Once speakers are oriented to this goal and away from others, oriented toward
alizations, and revealing the strucrure of reality to be rhetorical, that is, partial; general understanding, they will be incapable of deception and manipulation. A
but then it turns around and atternpts to use the insight of partiality to build company of transparent subjectivities will join together in the fashioning of a
something that is less pardal, less hostage to the urgencies of a particular vision transparent truth and of a world in which the will to power has been eliniinated.
and more responsive to the needs of men and wornen m general. Insofar as this In his recent book Textual Power (1985), Robert Scholes examines the ration-
"turn" is taken to its logical conclusion, it ends up reinventing at the conclusion alist epistemology in which a "complete selfconfronts a solid world, perceiving
of a rhetorically informed critique the entire array of antirhetorical gestures and it directly and accurately, ... capturing it perfectly in a transparent language"
exclusions. One sees this clearly in the work of Jürgen Habermas, a thinker and declares it to be so thoroughly discredited that it now «is lying in ruins
whose widespread influence is testimony to the durability of the tradition that around us" (132-33). Perhaps so, in sorne circies, but the fact of Haberrnas's
began (at least) with Plato. Habermas's goal is to bring about sornething he calls work and of the audience he commands suggests that even now those ruins are
the "ideal speech situation' a situation in which ali assertions proceed not from collecting themselves and rising again into the familiar antirherorical structure.
the perspective of individual desires and strategies, but from the perspective of a It would seem that any announcement of the death of either position will always
general rationality upon which aH parties are agreed. In such a situation nothing be premarure, slightly behind the institutional news that in sorne comer of the
220 STANLEY FISH RHETORIC 221

world supposedly abandoned questions are receivmg what at least appear to be port for Scholes's contention that the rival epistemology has been vanquished
new answers. Only recently, the public fortunes of rationalist-foundarionalist and for Clifford Geertz's announcernent (and he too is a contributor to the shift
thought have taken a favorable turn with the publication of books like Alan he reports) that "Something is happening to the way we think about the way we
Bloom's The Closing oftheAmerican Mmd and E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, think" (1980).
both of which (Bloom's more directly) challenge the "new Orthodoxy" of «ex- But it would seern, ftorn the evidence marshalled in this essay, that something
treme cultural relativism" and reassert, albeit in different ways, the existence of is always happening to the way WC think, and that it is always the same sorne-
normative standards. In many quarters these books have been welcomed as a thing, a tug-of-war between two views ofhuman life and its possibilities, no one
return to the common sense that is necessary if civilization is to avoid dic dark ofwhich can ever gain complete and lasting ascendancy because in the very mo-
night of anarchy. One can expect administrators and legislators to propose re- ment ofits triumphant articulation each turns back in the direction ofthe other.
forms (and perhaps even purges) based on Bloom's argumcnts (the rhetorical Thus Wayne Booth feels obliged in both The PJietoric cfFiction andA Rhetoric of
force of antirhetoricalism is always being revived) and one can expect too a host Irony to confine thc force ofrhetoric by sharply distinguishing its legitimate uses
ofvoiccs raised m opposition to what will surely be called the "new positivism' from two extreme limit cases (the «unreiable narrator" and "unstable irony");
Those voices will include sorne that have been recorded here and sorne others sorne reader-response critics deconstruct the autonomy and selfsufficiency of
that certainly merit recording, but can only be noted in a list that is itself incorn- the text, but in the process end up privileging the autonomous and self-sufficient
plete. The fuil story of rhetoric's twentieth-century resurgence would boast subject; sorne feminists challenge the essentialist claims of "male reason" in the
among its cast ofcharacters: Kenncth Burke, whose "dramatism" anticipates so narne ofa fernale rationality or nonrationality apparently no less essential; Jame-
much ofwhat is considered avant-garde today; Wayne Booth, whose The Rheto- son opens up the narrativity of history in order to proclaim one narrative the
nc ofFiction was so important in legitimizing the rhetorical analysis ofthe novel; true and unifying one. Here one might speak of the return of the repressed (and
Mikhail Bahktin, whose contrast ofmonologic to dialogic and heteroglossic dis- thereby invoke Freud, whose writings and influence would be still another chap-
course sums up so many strands in the rhetorical tradition; Roland Barthes, who ter in the story 1 have not even begun to teil) were it not that the repressed-
in the concept of "jouissance" makes a (non)constitutive prmciplc of the ten- whether it be the fact of difference or the desire for its elimination—is always so
dency of rhetoric to resist ciosure and extend play; the ethnornethodologists close to the surface that it hardly need be unearthed. What we seem to have is a
(Harold Garfinkel and company), who discover in every supposedly rule-bound tale fuil of sound and fury, and signifring itseIf, signifring a durability rooted in
context the operation of a principie (exactly the wrong word) of "ad-hocing"; inconclusiveness, in the impossibility of there being a last word.
Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, whosc TheNewRhetoric:A Treatise on In an essay, however, someone must have the last word and 1 give itto Richard
Argumentation provides a sophisticated modem source-book for would-be rhe- Rorty Rorty is himself a champion of the'antiessentialism that underlies rhetor-
toricians weary of always citing Aristotie; Barbara Hermstein Smith, who in the ical thinking; his neopragrnatism makes common cause with Kuhn and others
course of espousing an unashamed relativisrn directly confronts and argues who would turn us away from the search for transcendental absolutes and com-
down the objections of those who fear for their souls (and more) in a world mend to us (although it would seem superfluous to do so) the imperatives and
without objective standards; Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, who teach us goals already informing our practices. It is however, not the polemicist Rorty
(among other things) that "history... is unaccessible to us except in textual whorn 1 cail upon to sum up, but the Rorty who is the brisk chronicler of our
form, and that our approach toit and to the Real itselfnecessarily passes through episternological condition:
its prior textualization" (1981, 35); reader-oriented critics like Norman Ho!-
land, David Bleich, Wolfgang Iser, and H. R. Jauss, who by shifting the empha- There... are two ways of thinking about various things. . The..

sis from the text to its reception open up the act of interpretation to the infinite first... thinks of truth as a vertical relationship between represen-
variability of contextual circumstance; innumerable feminists who relentlessly tations and what is represented. The second... thinks of truth
unmask male hegemonic structures and expose as rhetorical the rational postur- horizontally—as the culminating reinterprctation of our prede-
ings of the legal and political systems; equally innumerable theorists of compo- cessors' reinterpretation of their predecessors' reinterpreta-
tion.... It is the difference between regarding truth, goodness,
sition who, under the slogan "process, not product," insist on the rhetorical na-
and beauty as eternal objects which we try to locate and revea!,
ture of communication and argue for far-reaching changes in the way writing is and regarding them as artifacts whose fundamental design we
taught. The list is already formidable, but it could go on and on, providing sup- often have to alter (1982, 92).
222 STANLEY FISH

It is the difference between serious and rhetorical man. It is the difference that
remains.
II
* III
SUGGESTED READINGS
Guthrie, W. 1971. The Sophists.
Howell, W. S. 1956. Logic andRhetoric in England 1500-1700.
I,iterature, Culture,
• 1971. Eqhteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric.
Kennedy, George. 1972. The Art of Persuasion in the Roman World (300Bc-
AD300).
• 1963. TheArt of Persuasion in Greece.
Politics
Murphy, J. J. 1966. Rhetoric in the MiddleAges.
Nelson, John S., Allan Megili, and Donaid N. McCloskey. 1987. The Rhetoric of
the Human Scienees: Language andArgument in Scholarship and PublieAffairs.
Ong, W J. 1958. Ramus, Method, and theDecay ofDialogue.
Perelman, Chaim, and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The New Rhetoric: A Trea-
tise onArgument.
Puttenham, George. 1936; 1970. TheArte ofEnglish Poesie (London, 1589).
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstem. 1988. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspecti ves
for Critical Theory.
Tuve, Rosemond. 1947. Elizabethan andMetaphysicallmagery. Renaissance Poetic
and Twentieth-Century Crities.
Vickers, Brian. 1988. In Defence of Rhetoric.
White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Hitorical Imaginatwn in Nineteenth-
Century Europe.