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 During the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, historians of rhetoric, composition, and communication vociferously theorized historiographical motivations and methodologies for writing histories in their fields. After this fertile period of rich, contested, and impassioned theorization, scholars busily undertook the composition of numerous historical works, complicating master narratives and recovering silenced voices and rhetorical practices. Yet, though historians in these fields have gone about the business of writing histories, the discussion of theorization has been quiet. In this welcome volume, fifteen scholars consider, once again, the theory of historiography, asking difficult questions about the purposes and methodologies of writing histories of rhetoric, broadly defined, and questioning what it means, what it should mean, what it could mean to write histories of rhetoric, composition, and communication.

The topics addressed include the privileging of the literary and the textual over material artifacts as prime sources of evidence in the study of classical rhetoric, the use of rhetorical hermeneutics as a methodology for interpreting past practices, the investigation of feminist methodologies that do not fit into the dominant modes of feminist historiographical work and the examination of archives with a queer eye to better construct nondiscriminatory narratives. Contributors also explore the value of approaching historiography through the lenses of jazz improvisation and complexity theory, and the historiographical method of writing the future in ways that refigure our relationships to time and to ourselves.           

Consistently thoughtful and carefully argued, these essays successfully revive the discussion of historiography in rhetoric, inspiring fresh avenues of exploration in the field.                                                 

Best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, and Science in Action, Bruno Latour has inspired scholarship across many disciplines. In the past few years, the fields of rhetoric and composition have witnessed an explosion of interest in Latour’s work. Editors Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers have assembled leading and emerging scholars in order to focus the debate on what Latour means for the study of persuasion and written communication.

Essays in this volume discern, rearticulate, and occasionally critique rhetoric and composition’s growing interest in Latour. These contributions include work on topics such as agency, argument, rhetorical history, pedagogy, and technology, among others. Contributors explain key terms, identify implications of Latour’s work for rhetoric and composition, and explore how his theories might inform writing pedagogies and be used to build research methodologies.

Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition shows how Latour’s groundbreaking theories on technology, agency, and networks might be taken up, enriched, and extended to challenge scholars in rhetorical studies (both English and communications), composition, and writing studies to rethink some of the field’s most basic assumptions.  It is set to become the standard introduction that will appeal not only to those scholars already interested in Latour but also those approaching Latour for the first time.

This wide-ranging volume gives proper attention to the views on rhetoric and style set forth by British literary figure Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), whose contributions to the history of rhetoric are often overlooked. Lois Peters Agnew presents an overview of this theorist’s life and provides cultural context for his time and place, with particular emphasis on the significance of his rhetoric as both an alternative strain of rhetorical history and a previously unrealized example of rhetoric’s transformation in nineteenth-century Britain. 

Agnew presents an extensive discussion of De Quincey’s ideas on rhetoric, his theory and practice of conversation, his theory of style and its role in achieving rhetoric’s dialogic potential, and his strategic use of humor and irony in such works as Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Synthesizing previous treatments of De Quincey’s rhetoric and connecting his unusual perspectives on language to the biographical details of his life, Agnew helps readers understand his intellectual development while bringing to light the cultural contexts that prompted radical changes in the ways nineteenth-century British intellectuals conceived of the role of language and the imagination in public and private discourse.

Agnew presents an alternative vision of rhetoric that departs from many common assumptions about rhetoric’s civic purpose and offers insights into the topic of rhetoric and technological change. The result is an accessible and thorough explanation of De Quincey’s complex ideas on rhetoric and the first work to fully show the reach of his ideas across multiple texts written during his lifetime.

Winner, 2018 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature

It is increasingly well documented that western rhetoric’s journey from pagan Athens to the medieval academies of Christian Europe was significantly influenced by the intellectual thought of the Muslim Near East. Lahcen Elyazghi Ezzaher contributes to the contemporary chronicling of this influence in Three Arabic Treatises on Aristotle’s Rhetoric: The Commentaries of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, offering English translations of three landmark medieval Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's famous rhetorical treatise together in one volume for the first time.  Elegant and practical, Elyazghi Ezzaher’s translations give English-speaking scholars and students of rhetoric access to key medieval Arabic rhetorical texts while elucidating the unique and important contribution of those texts to the revival of European interest in the rhetoric and logic of Aristotle, which in turn influenced the rise of universities and the shaping of Western intellectual life.   

With a focus on Book I of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the commentaries ofal-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes translated by Elyazghi Ezzaher are paramount examples of an extensive Arabic-Muslim tradition of textual commentary while also serving as rich corollaries to the medieval Greek and Latin rhetorical commentaries produced in Europe. Elyazghi Ezzaher’s translations are each accompanied by insightful scholarly introductions and notes that contextualize—both historically and culturally—these immensely significant works while highlighting a comparative, multidisciplinary approach to rhetorical scholarship that offers new perspectives on one of the field’s foundational texts.

A remarkable addition to rhetorical studies, Three Arabic Treatises on Aristotle’s Rhetoric: The Commentaries of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes not only provides vibrant English translations of essential medieval Arabic rhetorical texts but also challenges scholars and students of rhetoric to consider their own historical, cultural, and linguistic relationships to the texts and objects they study.

Current rhetorical and critical theory for the most part separates writing from consciousness and presumes relative truth to be the only possible expressive goal for rhetoric. These presumptions are reflected in our tradition of persuasive rhetoric, which values writing that successfully argues one person’s belief at the expense of another’s. Barbara Couture presents a case for a phenomenological rhetoric, one that values and respects consciousness and selfhood and that restores to rhetoric the possibility of seeking an all-embracing truth through pacific and cooperative interaction.

Couture discusses the premises on which current interpretive theory has supported relative truth as the philosophical grounding for rhetoric, premises, she argues, that have led to constraints on our notion of truth that divorce it from human experience. She then shows how phenomenological philosophy might guide the theory and practice of rhetoric, reanimating its role in the human enterprise of seeking a shared truth. She proposes profession and altruism as two guiding metaphors for the phenomenological activity of "truth-seeking through interaction."

Among the contemporary rhetoricians and philosophers who influence Couture are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Charles Altieri, Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Jürgen Habermas.