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The Revival of Rhetoric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Wayne C. Booth
Wayne C. Booth*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

As teachers of language and literature, you have all noticed that my title is even more ambiguous than most. Those of you who are amiably disposed may even have called it general, in the old style, rather than ambiguous, in the new. The word “rhetoric” has for a long time served for both the study of the art of persuasion and for the art itself; Aristotle's Rhetoric, upper-case, is still unsurpassed, but take away the capital letter and Aristotle's rhetoric is often very bad indeed, at least as we view it. In the second sense rhetoric has never had a real quantitative revival because it has always thrived; but in the first sense we seem to be in the midst of a revival of rhetoric unmatched in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in spite of some very good work, there are signs that it may prove a very shoddy revival indeed, with no more lasting effect than the rhetorically-oriented “communications” movement of a decade ago, unless we take thought about what we are doing. Judging from some of the recent freshman texts I have seen, I would not be surprised to find in my box tomorrow when I return a new work entitled A Speller's Rhetoric.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , May 1965 , pp. 8 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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Footnotes

*

An address given at the General Meeting on English in New York, 29 December 1964.

References

1 Critical comments by two of my friends have made me think that this claim is not only difficult to prove but quite probably mistaken. Mr. Ronald Crane suggests that it reflects plain ignorance of just how low controversy sank in previous centuries. “Have you read the attacks on Bentley?” Mr. Laurence Lerner reminds me of the standards, if they can be called that, of political controversy in the seventeenth century. And i remind myself, now, of what public debate could be like in nineteenth-century England and America.

Clearly the sweeping historical claims that run throughout this first section of my talk are in no way demonstrated by my examples. They might, in fact, be taken as illustrations of the very thing i am claiming to oppose: the use of mere assertion (the more extreme the better) in place of careful argument. Fortunately my argument that we need more and better rhetorical theorizing does not depend on the extreme claim that we are the most rhetorical age: it is enough that our lives are permeated by rhetoric, good or bad, and nobody doubts that.

I still suspect, pace Mr. Crane, that we are quantitatively the most rhetorical age in history—and not only in the undeniable sense that more men are living by rhetoric than ever before. Surely the proportion of rhetorical activities to non-rhetorical (like plowing, shearing, or building) is higher now than ever before. But this modified claim, a radical retreat from my original assertions, may be unimportant, and it is certainly one that would be hard to prove (Crane: “Can you think of any previous age with as much pure science or pure music? These two areas are less rhetorical than ever before”).