Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

Globalization/ Neo-liberalism as Opportunity for Public Sphere-Making? In Ackerman and Coogan's work on public rhetoric, the editors argue that the  public turn of writing since 1970 originates with or at least was focused at the Wingspread Confernce which addressed rhetoric’s epistemic crisis. “... the departure point was that neo-Aristotelian methods valorized persuasion and made exemplary the political speech within historical context of the state” and to see the message as larger than just persuasion, but also the rhetorical functions of ego-defence, knowledge-making, values expression (4).  Herbert F. Johnson, Jr., Wingspread, residence in Racine, Wisconsin. House reflected in pool. Library of Congress Prints and Photograph gsc 5a03863 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/gsc.5a03863  Communication/Speech was stifled in this tradition, but compositionists had moved beyond structure and form, current-traditional approaches. Then we see enter into the discipline the cogn...

“Rhetoric” may have been argued from Plato’s re-creation of Socrates's dialogue with Gorgias as persuasion, but it should be more clearly articulated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the environment or opportunity to persuade. Aristotle understood that in that environment, rhetoric was simply a tool that may be used within a social setting to engage and reveal one author’s point of view, and that no actual persuasion may actually take place -- in other words, even with skills used by the Sophists who were aware of the articulation and gestures appropriate to public oration, no techné was guaranteed to produce a result of real persuasion. Further, as Aristotle explained for all tools, rhetoric could be used for good or evil (only virtue was exempt from this possibility) and therefore may include components of logos, pathos, and ethos but would not necessarily be “reasonable” in the agora . Because of these limitations of the ancient discussions of rhetoric, we must look to somethin...