The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies
- Andrea A. Lunsford - Stanford University, USA
- Kirt H. Wilson - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA
- Rosa A. Eberly - Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Key Features:
- Brings together scholars from across the disciplines of Speech, Communication, English, and Writing Studies. While rhetoric is by definition interdisciplinary, self-identified scholars in the field are most often institutionally separated from one another. This Handbook bridges this divide by providing a refreshing range of transdisciplinary views on the nature, status, definition, and scope of rhetoric today.
- Offers a thorough-going overview of rhetorical studies today. Organized in four sections—Historical Studies in Rhetoric; Rhetoric Across the Disciplines; Rhetoric and Pedagogy, and Rhetoric and Public Discourse—the volume provides a single resource for engaging rhetorical studies.
- Underscores the importance of rhetoric to education across a wide range of disciplines as well as to effective participation in public arenas. Thus the volume connects rhetoric's long teaching tradition to an activist agenda for informed civic engagement.
- Addresses methodological and theoretical difficulties and offers means of negotiating them.
- Provides one of the first introductions to rhetorical studies across cultures and to the related debates concerning comparative and contrastive rhetorics.
"Imagine four separate critical anthologies, all excellent and useful, each devoted to a specialized subject area within a broad disciplinary topic, and each containing a useful survey of the subject's historical context and intellectual pedigree and a brief introduction to the ensuing articles that demonstrate the current thinking within the field from a variety of useful perspectives. Combine these hypothetical titles into a single volume, add a statement of scope and purpose that combines personal history with an excellent survey of the intellectual and academic milieu out of which the specialized subjects arose, and one has the present title. Lunsford (Stanford), Wilson (Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities), and Eberly (Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park) offer 32 chapters in four divisions: "Historical Studies in Rhetoric," "Rhetoric across the Disciplines," "Rhetoric and Pedagogy," and "Rhetoric and Public Discourse." The many contributors remind the reader that rhetoric today is an ever-expanding, inclusive subject best characterized as an interdisciplinary creature ranging freely across (and even beyond) the fields of English, composition and writing, and communications. In its theory and applied practice, rhetoric has become something greater than the Greeks imagined, something better identified as meta-rhetoric, unlimited by its current conception and reevaluation of what "rhetorical" means. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
Sage College Publishing
