Rhetorical Hermeneutics
Subtitle: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (S U N Y Series in Speech Communication)
Contributors: Allan G. Gross (Editor); William M. Keith (Editor)
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: October 1996
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 371
ISBN-13: 9780791431108
Subjects: Philosophy; Rhetoric; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Language Arts & Disciplines; Science/Mathematics; Rhetorical criticism; Logic; Hermeneutics; Science
Description: Rhetorical Hermeneutics asks whether rhetorical theory can function as a general hermeneutic, a master key to texts.

The dazzling central essay by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar questions rhetoric's globally interpretive status; Gaonkar begins with the ubiquity of rhetoric: It is a habit of our time to invoke rhetoric, time and again, to make sense of a wide variety of discursive practices that beset and perplex us, and of discursive artifacts that annoy and entertain us, and of discursive formations that inscribe and subjugate us. Rhetoric is a way of reading the endless discursive debris that surrounds us.

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Starting from the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, and Lawrence Prelli on the rhetoric of science, Gaonkar broadens his critique to fundamental issues for any rhetorical theory and develops four questions that cut to the heart of the possibility of a (post)modern rhetoric: How can rhetoric, an art traditionally directed toward practice, transform itself into hermeneutic theory, a mode of reading? Does contemporary rhetorical theory have legitimate theoretical status?

Can an intentional, strategic theory of rhetoric survive the poststructuralist, postmodernist critique? Is the case study, the centerpiece of rhetorical and ethnographic scholarship, epistemologically robust enough to bear the weight of a discipline?