Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the aims, audience, structure, and content of The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. In addition to defining rhetoric and mapping the field of rhetorical studies, it provides a historical context for the contemporary resurgence of interest in rhetoric through a discussion of new methods of textual and historical analysis, the modern expansion of the field of rhetoric, and novel forms of rhetorical theory and practice made possible by new media technologies. The introduction also provides detailed summaries of all 60 chapters, arranged thematically to offer a topical survey or “snapshot” of the Handbook as a whole. In general, the introduction argues that rhetoric, far from being moribund, is a protean, multifaceted art that plays a key role in myriad academic disciplines (drama, literature, philosophy, etc.) and fields of social practice (law, politics, education, etc.).

Rhetoric and Gender in British Literature

This chapter examines the intermingling of rhetorical theory, educational training in Latin grammar and rhetoric, and literary representations that designate bodies, texts, genres, figures, and tropes as “male,” “female,” and/or “epicene” (of common gender). Arguing that a tripartite rather than binary scheme is appropriate to early modern British literature and culture, the chapter historicizes Jacques Lacan’s abstract psychoanalytic claims about the “Symbolic Order” by examining language games, community practices, and social texts at work in literary texts that translate classical rhetorical training into vernacular literary practice. Focusing on William Shakespeare, John Webster, and George Gascoigne, the chapter explores the vogue for Ovidian cross-voicing in light of grammar school training in prosopopoeia and impersonation. Along the way it analyzes many examples of literary imitatio in which a male/female binary distinction collapses and rhetoric’s translation into literary invention is rendered legible in epicene figures that defy easy categorization.

Rhetoric and Environment

This chapter explores the vexing relationship between rhetorical studies and the environmental problematic. On one hand, rhetorical analyses of environmental exigencies and debates are salutary, fostering the bases for reconciliations of competing positions about the value of the natural world. On the other hand, rhetoric fails to account for the epistemological consequences of its own anthropocentrism. The latter obliges rhetoric to frame all biophysical urgencies into matters of human (mis)communication. Rhetoric, in effect, leaves the actual environment outside of its considerations, recasting environmental emergencies as rhetorical ones. The article argues for a thoroughgoing rhetorical critique of anthropocentrism, a more capacious notion of nonhuman rhetorical agency, and a theorization of the environmental conditioning of all rhetorical situations.

Rhetoric and Law

This chapter reexamines the older scholarly consensus that humanist rhetoric had no great effect on legal development in sixteenth-century England. It argues that the humanist emphasis on topical invention led to a blurring of distinctions between rhetoric and dialectic, and that key to both were artificial proofs derived from “circumstances,” “accidents,” and “predicaments.” It shows first how circumstances, employed in criminal procedure, helped develop the law of evidence and then goes on to show how this terminology was used to shape the “reasons” for decisions in highly significant civil cases such as Calvin’s Case (1608). If a major development of English common law in this period is its new emphasis on the reasoned decisions of courts as a source of law, this article proposes that it was topical invention that shaped the “reasons” and, hence, the law.

Rhetoric and Theater

This chapter demonstrates the impact of rhetorical training in shaping the Elizabethan theater at the end of the sixteenth century. English schoolmasters had translated the Latin rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian into the vernacular, and these verbal forms—schemes, tropes, and figures—became a central feature of Tudor pedagogy; two classroom exercises in rhetoric were prosopopoeia (the impersonation of a character) and argumentum in utramque partem (defending both sides of a debating question). Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe first exploited these rhetorical and poetic forms theatrically in the 1580s, and shortly thereafter William Shakespeare built on their model in the abundant poetic artifice of his early history cycle, a feature especially apparent in Henry VI, Part Three. Crucially, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the possibilities of rhetoric as a persuasive art served to complicate the drama and thus to immerse the audience in the process of interpretation.

Rhetoric and Science

This chapter explores the return of the problem of rhetoric for science in the modern period. In contemporary technoscience, rhetoric functions as an integral aspect of the production and circulation of knowledge as well as an often scapegoated reminder of the fundamental limits on knowledge understood as “objectivity” circulated by and for subjects experiencing nothing but “subjectivity.” By focusing on “entropy” as both a polyvalent term within thermodynamics and information theory and as an apparent constraint limiting and enabling the communication and production of scientific knowledge, the chapter points to the larger scaled ecosystem of attention within which the proliferating and diversifying locales of scientific knowledge production emerge in the modern and postmodern periods, an ecosystem labeled by diverse commentators as the “noösphere.”

Rhetoric and Semiotics

This chapter explores the relation between rhetoric and semiotics, with particular reference to Paris school structuralist semiotics and Sydney school social semiotics. The Paris school, following the lead of Roland Barthes, engaged extensively with rhetoric, focusing mostly on figuration (elocutio), and applying it to visual communication. The Sydney school made less explicit reference to rhetoric, but its genre theory can be interpreted as a modern theory of dispositio. It also engaged with elocutio through the concept of grammatical metaphor, but without the emphasis on rhetorical figures as signifiers of ideology that had characterized Barthes’s work. The chapter attempts to make the rhetorical aspect of social semiotics a little more explicit, looking in particular at the theory of genre as a theory of arrangement (dispositio).

Rhetoric and Architecture

To many, the phrase “architecture and rhetoric” might conjure the image of a palace overinflated with empty words, teeming with stylish yet superfluous ornament. For a Renaissance mind, imbued with medieval habitus and freshly infused with rediscovered texts and new horizons overseas, the complementarity of architecture and rhetoric was pragmatic and poetic, expanding memory practices and modes of figuration, including ekphrasis and ut pictura poesis. After the doubling of the known world, a new world of stuff precipitated new empirical methods of inquiry, problematizing rhetorical habits of establishing credible truth by persuasive argument. Throughout, architecture and its appointments stimulated compositional invention and performative gestures, outfitting personal identity and public decorum by offering transport from past to future, between the everyday and ideal.

Rhetoric and Digital Media

The digital computer has been an influential feature of contemporary work and culture since before World War II, but rhetoricians have only formed theories of and approaches to digital or computational rhetoric since the 1980s, when the rise of the personal computer made these devices a part of everyday life. This chapter traces the history of rhetoric and computation in information theory, cybernetics, computer science, and media theory, in addition to outlining the variety of contemporary approaches to digital and computational rhetoric. By digging deeper into the computational foundations of software and hardware systems and elucidating those systems as participants in meaning creation as much as engineering practice, rhetoric has the potential to offer a complement or “counterpart” (antistrophos) to computer science and engineering.

Rhetoric and Political Theory

This chapter first details the prevailing hostility toward rhetoric and doxa (appearance/opinion) in the tradition of political theory from Plato to Walter Lippmann before turning to a close examination of Hannah Arendt’s critical response to that tradition. Where Plato attacks rhetoric as a deceptive form of domination, Arendt argues that politics is essentially a matter of doxa and hence of rhetoric. Reality itself is, in the polis, a matter of appearing in speech and deed, with the emphasis upon the former. Political action is first and foremost speech that reveals the speaker as “answering, talking back, and measuring up to whatever happened or was done.” Such revelatory speech is most appropriately judged by the standard of glory. Because such speech must inform as well as reveal, so does glorious speech rise to the level of greatness in part because of what is said, to whom, where, and how.