Rhetoric Reclaimed - (Rhetoric and Society) by Janet M Atwill (Paperback)

About the Book

This book offers a critique of traditional conceptions of the liberal arts, exploring the challenges posed by cultural diversity to the aims and methods of a humanist education through the lens of a neglected classical tradition of rhetoric.

Book Synopsis

Thoroughly embedded in postmodern theory, this book offers a critique of traditional conceptions of the liberal arts, exploring the challenges posed by cultural diversity to the aims and methods of a humanist education. Janet M. Atwill investigates a neglected tradition of rhetoric, exemplified by Protagoras and Isocorates, and preserved in Aristotle's Rhetoric.

This tradition was rooted in the ancient sophistic and platonic conceptions of techné, or productive knowledge, that appears both in literary texts from the seventh century B.C.E. and in medical and technical treatises from the fifth century B.C.E. Atwill examines these traditions, together with sophistic and platonic conceptions, and considers the commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric by E. M. Cope and William S. J. Grimaldi, where the concepts of techné and productive knowledge disappear in the modern opposition between theory and practice.

Since models of knowledge are closely tied to models of subjectivity, Atwill's examination of techné also explores the role of political, economic, and educational institutions in standardizing a specific model for subjectivity. She argues that the liberal arts traditions largely eclipsed the social and political functions of rhetoric, transforming it from an art of disrupting and reinventing lines of power to a discipline of producing a normative subject, defined by virtue but modeled on a specific gender and class type.

Review Quotes

In Rhetoric Reclaimed, Janet Atwill offers a new framework for understanding the history of Western rhetoric and a reinterpretation of Aristotle's place within that history.... She has done much to illuminate the competing forms of knowledge and subjectivity inscribed in the canonical texts of ancient rhetoric and has recovered a lost or under-appreciated dimension of these texts. In so doing, Rhetoric Reclaimed... also suggests a starting point for reassessing and renegotiating the priorities and values we have inherited from the rhetorical tradition.

The publication of Janet Atwill's Rhetoric Reclaimed has served to powerfully recuperate and supplement an important conversation among the Greek sophists, one in which the notion of techné emerged not only as a rhetorical strategy, but also as a way of being and as an attitude about knowledge.... The importance of Atwill's book lies in its suggestion that attention to téchne can enlarge our understanding of rhetoric in general and the theorizing and teaching of cooperative approaches to writing in particular.

About the Author

Janet M. Atwill is Professor of English at University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She is the coeditor of The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition.