This book is a critically informed challenge to the traditional
histories of rhetoric and to the current emphasis on Aristotle and
Plato as the most significant classical voices in rhetoric. In it,
Susan C. Jarratt argues that the first sophists--a diverse group of
traveling intellectuals in the fifth century B.C.--should be given
a more prominent place in the study of rhetoric and composition.
Rereading the ancient sophists, she creates a new lens through
which to see contemporary social issues, including the
orality/literacy debate, feminist writing, deconstruction, and
writing pedagogy.
The sophists' pleasure in the play of language, their focus on
historical contin-gency, and the centrality of their teaching for
democratic practice were sufficiently threatening to their
successors Plato and Aristotle that both sought to bury the
sophists under philosophical theories of language. The censure of
Plato and Aris-totle set a pattern for historical views of the
sophists for centuries. Following Hegel and Nietzsche, Jarratt
breaks the pattern, finding in the sophists a more progressive
charter for teachers and scholars of reading and writing, as well
as for those in the adjacent disciplines of literary criticism and
theory, education, speech communication, and ancient history.
In tracing the historical interpretations of sophistic rhetoric,
Jarratt suggests that the sophists themselves provide the outlines
of an alternative to history-writing as the discovery and
recounting of a set of stable facts. She sees sophistic use of
narrative in argument as a challenge to a simple division between
orality and literacy, current discussions of which virtually ignore
the sophists.Outlining similarities between "ecriture feminine "and
sophistic style, Jarratt shows that contemporary feminisms have
more in common with sophists than just a style; they share a
rhetorical basis for deployment of theory in political action. In
her final chapter, Jarratt takes issue with accounts of sophistic
pedagogy focusing on technique and the development of the
individual. She argues that, despite its employment by powerful
demagogues, sophistic pedagogy offers a resource for today's
teachers interested in encouraging minority voices of resistance
through language study as the practice of democracy.
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