Synopses & Reviews
"This is an important book: original, erudite, useful and ambitious." --Quarterly Journal of Speech
"A remarkable book... sure to be of lasting interest... to be reckoned with by all rhetorical theorists." --Choice
This is the first contemporary attempt at a holistic theory of rhetoric, well grounded in the context of cultural and social history. Arguing that rhetoric has always been an independent, objective, essential factor in human interaction, Valesio views it as coextensive with human speech in use.
Table of Contents
Preface
I. What and Why: The Ontology
1.1 The Problem
1.2 The Field of Rhetoric
II. The Commonplace as the Common Place
2.1 The Aristotelian Dilemma
2.2 The Rhetoric of Antirhetoric
III. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Dialectic
3.1 The Rock Bottom
3.2 Strategies and Tactics
3.3 The Tortuous Path to Dialectic
3.4 The Nature of Dialectic
3.5 Structures and Discontinuities
IV. The Structure of the Rheme
4.1 The Thicket of Syntax
4.2 At the Frontiers of Linguistics
4.3 The Fragment
4.4 The Metaphor
4.5 The Critique of Ideologies
4.6 Concluding Perspective
Notes
Selected Bibliography