Rhetorical Power / Edition 1

by Steven Mailloux

Overview

In this provocative and forcefully written book, Steven Mailloux takes issue with the validity of a number of distinctions commonly made in contemporary literary theory and cultural studies—distinctions between theory and history, reader and text, truth and ideology, aesthetics and politics.

Mailloux first presents the case for a rhetorical hermeneutics and against foundationalist theories of interpretation. Doing hermeneutic theory, he argues, entails doing rhetorical history. By means of a detailed analysis of reader-response criticism, he highlights the connections between institutional politics and the interpretive rhetoric of academic literary criticism.

Mailloux then uses Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an exemplary text. Relating Mark Twain's rhetoric to the cultural politics of post-Reconstruction debates about racist ideology, he places his reader-oriented interpretation within the rhetorical history of controversies over the meaning and value of Huckleberry Finn. Finally, in a far-ranging study of cultural reception, he juxtaposes the twentieth-century concern about the topic of race in Huckleberry Finn with the nineteenth-century audience's very different concerns about juvenile delinquency and the "bad-boy boom." In the final part of the book, Mailloux restates his critique of foundationalist hermeneutics through readings of Ken Kesey, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Richard Rorty, and he concludes by examining the role of rhetoric and theory in a congressional dispute over the Reagan administration's reinterpretation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Rhetorical Power will be welcomed by readers in literary theory and American studies, as well as in such fields as speech communication, the sociology of culture, and social and intellectual history, and by others interested in the politics of persuasion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801496028
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/27/1989
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.62(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Steven Mailloux is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the author of Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics, also published by Cornell University Press.

What People are Saying About This

Ellen Rooney

Rhetorical Power intervenes in some of the most crucial debates in literary theory and criticism and offers a subtle and lucid model for displacing their less fruitful contradictions. It will be of interest to all students of interpretation and culture, in literature departments and in programs in cultural studies (and perhaps even in history and philosophy departments). Mailloux's theory and practice of rhetorical hermeneutics in this book offers an escape from the theoretical/critical/political impasse that oppositions like history/theory and politics/rhetoric have forced upon us.

Editorial Reviews

"Rhetorical Power intervenes in some of the most crucial debates in literary theory and criticism and offers a subtle and lucid model for displacing their less fruitful contradictions. It will be of interest to all students of interpretation and culture, in literature departments and in programs in cultural studies (and perhaps even in history and philosophy departments). Mailloux's theory and practice of rhetorical hermeneutics in this book offers an escape from the theoretical/critical/political impasse that oppositions like history/theory and politics/rhetoric have forced upon us."

--Ellen Rooney, Professor of Modern Culture and Media and English, Brown University

From the Publisher

"Rhetorical Power intervenes in some of the most crucial debates in literary theory and criticism and offers a subtle and lucid model for displacing their less fruitful contradictions. It will be of interest to all students of interpretation and culture, in literature departments and in programs in cultural studies (and perhaps even in history and philosophy departments). Mailloux's theory and practice of rhetorical hermeneutics in this book offers an escape from the theoretical/critical/political impasse that oppositions like history/theory and politics/rhetoric have forced upon us."

Ellen Rooney