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"Rhetoric, the Polis, and the Global Village" represents current
thought on the role of rhetoric in various disciplines, and
includes such diverse topics as race, technology, and religion,
demonstrating the expanding relevance of rhetoric in today's world.
The essays included in this volume address the question of the
polis in ancient and modern times, gradually converging with the
more recent 30-year span between the decade of the Global Village
and today's rhetorical rehearsals for a political global economy.
Originating from the 1998 Rhetoric Society of America's biennial
conference, and representing the 30-year anniversary of the
organization, this volume offers to all readers the keynote
lectures and selected papers celebrating the universality of
rhetoric across cultures. As a benchmark for the scholarship and
growth of the rhetoric discipline in recent history, it will be of
great interest to scholars in classical and contemporary rhetoric,
writing, and other fields in which rhetoric has attained critical
significance and influence.
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.
At around the same time that Aristotle was active in ancient
Greece, many students in China, including Sun Tzu, who would later
write The Art of War, were learning the techniques of persuasion
from Guiguzi, "the Master of the Ghost Valley." This pre-Qin
dynasty recluse produced what is considered the earliest Chinese
treatise devoted entirely to the art of persuasion. Called Guiguzi
after its author, the text provides an indigenous rhetorical theory
and key persuasive strategies, some of which are still used by
those involved in decision making and negotiations in China today.
In "Guiguzi," China's First Treatise on Rhetoric, Hui Wu and C. Jan
Swearingen present a new critical translation of this foundational
work, which has great historical significance for the study of
Chinese rhetoric and communication and yet is little known to
Western readers.
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