In The Realms of Rhetoric, contributors from a wide range of disciplines explore the challenges and opportunities faced in building a curricular space in the academy for rhetoric. Although rhetoric education has its roots in ancient times, the modern era has seen it fragmented into composition and public speaking, obscuring concepts, theories, and skills. Petraglia and Bahri consider the prospects for rhetoric education outside of narrow disciplinary constraints and, together with leading scholars, examine opportunities that can propel and revitalize rhetoric education at the beginning of the millennium.

The Realm of Rhetoric follows in the tradition of the author's The New Rhetoric, hailed for its wide-ranging and innovative approaches to argumentation. In this new study Chaim Perelman continues to develop his ideas on the theory of rhetoric, now even more cogently and persuasively presented. Pruned of much detail present in the earlier book, this new work captures the essence of his thought in a style and presentation suitable to the program and needs of an English-speaking audience. It is an ideal instruction medium for students approaching theories of informal argumentation for the first time. Perelman raises the questions, "How do claims to reasonableness arise in prose that is not formally logical?" and "What does 'reasonableness' mean for some who speaks of 'reasonable men' or 'beyond reasonable doubt'?" He then shows how claims to rationality are embedded in a number of verbal structures heretofore considered exclusively ornamental or dispositional. He identifies and discusses many argumentative techniques in addition to the quasi-logical methods conventionally treated in textbooks and notes numerous subforms of argumentation within each of the general types he identifies.

This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture’s beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas’ foundational theory of pollution as "matter out of place," using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture’s cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology.

Plato privileges the realm of absolute reality and truth above and beyond the world of language, discourse, and rhetoric. For Plato, earth harbors the façade of mere appearances and the evils of the bewitching powers of language. In RHETORIC’S EARTHLY REALM: HEIDEGGER, SOPHISTRY, AND THE GORGIAN KAIROS, Bernard Alan Miller counters this intellectual legacy with an innovative and thoroughly conceived theory of rhetoric, one concerned with “earth” in its Heideggerian aspect, complex and multifaceted, at the root of a phenomenology placing the focus on earth as the power of Being itself, whereby it is manifest purely as language.

Examines the relationship of civic discourse to built environments through a case study of the Cabrini Green urban revitalization project in Chicago.

This collection of essays, edited by Victor J. Vitanza, is a historiography of rhetoric, summarizing what has recently been accomplished in the revision of traditional histories of rhetoric and discussing what might be accomplished in the future. Featuring a variety of approaches—classical, revisionary, and avant-garde—it includes articles by Janet M. Atwill, James A. Berlin, William A. Covino, Sharon Crowley, Hans Kellner, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, John Schilb, Jane Sutton, Kathleen Ethel Welch, Lynn Worsham, and Victor J. Vitanza. In the first essay, Sharon Crowley identifies the major players and primary issues in a chronological narrative of the debate about the writing of the history of rhetoric that has arisen between traditionalists / essentialists and revisionists/constructionists. In recent years, traditionalists have demanded a more complete and accurate history, while revisionists have sought a critical understanding of the various epistemological-ideological grounds upon which a history of rhetoric had been and could be constructed. Revisionists, in their search for multiple, contestatory histories, have begun to critique one another, breaking into two general groups: one favoring a political-social program, the other resisting and disrupting such an approach. Vitanza echoes Crowley’s review of this ongoing debate by asking a crucial question: What exactly does it mean to be a revisionist historian? By combining the disintegration of various revisionist and subversive positions into a communal "we," he asks an additional question: Who is the "we" writing histories of rhetoric? The essays that follow give a rich answer to Vitanza’s questions. They bring the writing of histories of rhetoric into the larger area of postmodern theory, raising neglected issues of race, gender, and class. Written with a variety of intentions, some of the essays are expository and highly argumentative while others are manifestos, innovative and far-reaching in tone. Still others are summaries and background studies, providing useful information to both the novice student and the experienced scholar. This book, situated at a juncture between two disciplines, composition studies and speech, will be a landmark collection for many years.

New Directions in Rhetoric and Religion reflects the complex and fluid natures of religion, rhetoric, and public life in our globalized, digital, and politically polarized world by bringing together a diverse group of rhetorical scholars to provide a comprehensive and forward-looking collection on rhetoric and religion. This volume addresses these topics in three separate sections: 1. Rhetorics of religion at work in public activism, 2. Rhetorics of religion in contemporary public discourse, and 3. Ways that rhetoric scholars study religion. Scholars of rhetoric, religion, and social sciences will find this book particularly interesting.