This pathbreaking study integrates the histories of rhetoric,
literacy, and literary aesthetics up to the time of Augustine,
focusing on Western concepts of rhetoric as dissembling and of
language as deceptive that Swearingen argues have received
curiously prominent emphasis in Western aesthetics and language
theory. Swearingen reverses the traditional focus on rhetoric as an
oral agonistic genre and examines it instead as a paradigm for
literate discourse. She proposes that rhetoric and literacy have in
the West disseminated the interrelated notions that through
learning rhetoric individuals can learn to manipulate language and
others; that language is an unreliable, manipulable, and contingent
vehicle of thought, meaning, and communication; and that literature
is a body of pretty lies and beguiling fictions. In a bold
concluding chapter Swearingen aligns her thesis concerning early
Western literacy and rhetoric with contemporary critical and
rhetorical theory; with feminist studies in language, psychology,
and culture; and with studies of literacy in multi- and
cross-cultural settings.
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